GIFT OF EARLIER POEMS REGINALD C. ROBBINS CAMBRIDGE at W$ 1916 COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY REGINALD CHAUNCEY ROBBINS ALL RIGHTS RESERVED GIFT CONTENTS I. POEMS OF APPRECIATION ... I ON CERTAIN GOSPEL PAINTINGS . . J AN "AUTOUR DU BERCEAU " ... 6 A "DEAD MONK" .... .. . 8 A MADONNA OF DEL SARTO . ... 9 APOTHEOSIS . ..... . . 12 A MEMORIAL . 14 SUFFERANCE . ... ... 16 "MARL-E NASCENTI" . . . ". .I/ KARNAK. ....... . . . . 20 THE TOMBS OF THE KINGS AT THEBES . 23 ABU SIMBEL 2$ THE SCULPTURES OF ABU SIMBEL, WITHIN 27 KERRERI 30 "OH, TO WHOM?" . . * * . . 32 A DIALOGUE 35 MELOSPIZA .38 ill 424544 CONTENTS II. POEMS OF NATURE 41 MID-MAY 43 SPIRIT 47 SOUL 5! WHITSUNTIDE 53 SPRING-MOON 56 QUIET . 58 FORCE 60 MIDSUMMER 63 MORTMAIN 67 NOON 69 MARSH-MUSIC 71 A CEREMONIAL VERSE 73 CONSECRATION 77 RESIGNATION 80 THE BARBARIANS 82 HIEMATION 87 UNDER GLASS 91 THE GARDEN OF THE GULF .... 97 IV CONTENTS III. POEMS PSYCHOLOGICAL . . . . 101 THE SWIMMER . . . . 103 CARRION .-.- .. . . . .105 THE NOVICE 108 THE VIOLINIST . . . . . . .HI ONE WAY OF GRIEF ... . .11$ THE HERMIT 1 19 AN ORNITHOLOGIST 123 AN ASTRONOMER 127 THE DIVORCED . . , . / .131 A CANDIDATE FOR COMMITTAL. . .136 THE CONVALESCENT . . . . .142 THE BLOCKADER 1 52 THE PATROL l62 A DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY . . .173 A HORTICULTURIST. ..... 184 THE PRIMA DONNA 195 EARLIER POEMS POEMS OF APPRECIATION ON CERTAIN GOSPEL PAINTINGS THE story of an alien race ; minute, Painstaking portraiture of Syrian, Jew, Greek, Arab, Roman : if a tragedy, Yet strange ; if an apotheosis, still Too fleshly (ay, too blood-stain d) to believe! Has it become but this ? That saviorship Saved, then, the world a scant two thousand years ; Not now nor yet tomorrow ? Yesterday Was Christ Christ; and today but Joseph s son ? Just people painted : these are thieves ; and he A malefactor ! Nay, no paradise Nor thin transfiguration spoils the spell Of sweat and dust ; of some mere agony Of wasted passion, of a thwarted soul At best but disillusion d. And the poor, Deluded, disappointed Semite folk Turn back to toil with heavy heart, take up Alone and wholly comfortless the grim, Interminable burden. That is all ; Just people painted : an intense, sweet life 3 EARLIER POEMS Crush d out and ended ; and a discontent Where had been undemurring drudgery. Just people painted. Slightly from the shore A boat becalm d, with silent fisher-folk Silently fishing ; and an azure sky Quiet above the boat, and underneath, A quiet, azure water ; and about, A pasture-land ; and, lo ! a little town At peace and undemurring : all is quite In the world as though there had not been a son To Joseph nor to Mary. And, behold ! There stands upon the shore alone, unseen, Mary s and Joseph s son. And all the world (He sees and knows) is as if he, a man, Had never been : his agony, his life So tragic-true, saving men yesterday ; Not now, nor yet tomorrow ! And in that Unspoken and unspeakable despair He calls or seems to call ; is seen or seems So to be seen quiet upon the shore With earnest beckoning. And they becalm d ON CERTAIN GOSPEL PAINTINGS Start up from fishing ; for they seem to see. It is the story of an alien race ; A folk whose human tragedy endured To save men s souls a scant two thousand years ; Not now, nor yet tomorrow. Shall the world Be as though yesterday had never been ? AN "AUTOUR DU BERCEAU" WERE it not for the angel in the place, The place were so forlorn : a chamber, cold, Low, rough and scantly cumber d ; here a stool, Yonder the settle, and in homeliest sort The mother s mattress, cradle for the babe : Beyond these, nothing. Only, of the bed A woman, worn and weak almost to death ; Of the crib a weanling scarce with strength of life Yet, but with potency to wax and grow Big to the father s frame he has not seen Nor e er may know save she shall, point by point, Mould the babe to be manly as was once Her man and guardian of the house. But she Can nothing of herself ; can scarcely live A little ; much less, lend of life. And, were These all that fill d the place, ay, how forlorn ! Yet, to the nature of the need, is come An angel in the house. An utmost need And he is there, busied about the babe AN "AUTOUR DU BERCEAU " Beseemingly. She is too sick to say : " Sir, spare us ; render your benignity Where is more worth." Nor had she dream d to urge Of heaven such aid august. She lies there now By very reason of her need of help Quietly, awfully accepting so The ministry ; one hand by force of love, Even despite the fever, raised (the least) In mother-motion toward the babe. And he, The babe, too young to question whence the care If supernature s, or the world s right way, Croons, as t would seem, with somewhat which can touch Sick ears to sympathy. And so she lies Her lids just lifted to that light between The white wings. It were so forlorn a place Were not the angel there. But need is hers And love and he is there ; and shall be there In the house of love. For such were ne er forlorn. A "DEAD MONK" SO, he has triumph d. This is his reward. Thus shall the triumph ever be. And thus Be the reward. Mark the grim jaws that lock d To bar world s bread out. Lo ! the inward lids And beetling fore-brow, hard-drawn, glooming down To screen sight from earth s seeming all with aim To cheat earth at the last and leave with her Nothing of manhood. Ay, for nothing earth s Nor man s remain d to die out of this corpse. This is earth s, man s revenge ; that here remains Nought worth commemoration. Could a sense Screen d from earth s seeming pierce these shows of things To earth-hood and be manhood that remains A memorable presence ? Could he be Immortal, all whose life expected death ? A MADONNA OF DEL SARTO But still the other s Virgin was bis wife NAY, there is nought more holy in the world Than this her motherhood : no mystery, Miraculous dispensation ; none the less Divine in wrapt acceptance of the truth. Hers, no mere ignorance of woes to come, Nor yet reluctance ; but a soft acclaim For boundless possibility to be Sponsor to man s extremest sacrifice : For any sacrifice in absolute peace (With scarce appeal for recompense to God !) Her mother s soul may earn of her man-child. She would not so deny divinity As to forswear man-child for born of man. She would not need a heaven, who, at the cross As now, would wear still the same sober grace For wisdom that our worldhood is divine. Here is it shown me, this so holy thing Of motherhood. Here will I sit and seek To fathom it ; and learn thee, O Andrea ! EARLIER POEMS She was thy wife, we know. Yet much of this Thou gavest. Seem d she like this, then, to thee ? Think ! a man s wife may be madonna too, Both truths in one love ! Raphael had none Such intimate insight ; for he had no wife, Could paint Madonna only. Titian, haply, Achieved too loftily to learn a truth So humbly holy. Michelangelo Knew thousand shapes of mightiness ; his strength Was desperate, glorious more than motherly. Rubens ? There s scarce one pose of all but smacks Of some vulgarity. Murillo fain Had painted this thou paintedst, O Andrea ! The rest are round about thee. Thou hast found Even in thy forthright, plain presentment homely Of this thou knowest, nimbus d by thy great, Kind, twilight, pitying soul with immanence Of adumbration : thou hast spoken the love Without sin and the spirit incarnated Nor Titian, Raphael, nay, Angelico Had more than symbolized. Did they believe 10 A MADONNA OF DEL SARTO Theirs were no symbols ? Ah ! but now the signs Have need of explanation ; so are false. What now the Virgin-Birth ? What angel came To Mary yearning ? Who might mean he saw Aught womanly ascend into the clouds ? And what their import were these facts approved ? But one truth speaks which these mere signs would show; One Mother-of-God there is, each newest hour A woman realizes (not with fear With glad assumption of the privilege !) That hers is for another infinite life To offer infinite life ; and be divine In being motherly. This, O Andrea, Is thine : thy wife ; so, thy madonna too ! II APOTHEOSIS A LEGEND OF THE PAINTING BUDDHA " MAJESTY ! by your pardon ! courtiers all, My critics ! much is it of grief to me Through your dissatisfaction ; yet not anger, Envy nor malice in me that I learn Your loftier lights than mine ; but loneliness Where least I seem d alone. This scene which suits You, Majesty, and you, critics, so ill ; This forest-park, this foliaged tracery Of twining boughs and moss and cool-sluiced brooks, This green and garden d sanctuary; made I Of paint from pallet that therein I might As in an own particular paradise Delight, with you, through you ; and that therein My spirit, god-like, leaving at its death This patient tenement, in such abode, Yea, in this very painted plash and plume Of cold brook and of whispering pine, should bide Eternally as in Nirvana. These I made ; who feel a soul-sufficiency 12 APOTHEOSIS Even in this scene which suits you, sirs, so ill Mine own particular paradise ! I grieve But that alone, untenanted of you These groves receive me so in singleness ; Me dead to man s less-world I fain had loved : A God ! By pardon, Majesty, I take Farewell now ; enter into and enjoy Nirvana ; feel this art-world I have made, Truth of mine everlasting being. Man, Forever fare thee well ! " He turn d and stepp d Into that painted world of leaves and boughs His heart and hand had made ; turn d, enter d in And disappear d mid those hush d, whispering stems c Then did that whole wood-world his soul had made Vanish aloft in a live light, all hues Melted and intermingled unto White. But one saith musingly : " What god is he? No god ! The god-like had still wrought and staid ! " A MEMORIAL HERE in the chancel-stillness let us sit And dream together of the dead. For thou Lovedst the dead with fitly equal love. And here are none to move with murmur d prayer ; Nor mighty, overpowering music pour d To bear the dream adown : but quiet now, Silence and splendor of the shining shrine. See how the Christ in simplest dignity, Tender and strong and gravely radiant sits With hand half-lifted, teaching. See how kneels Restful, upheld with sweet self-poise of faith, Buoy d about as by fervor of full proof, And eyes one reverence of high belief, Mary. And light between, above, beyond And wide about in beams of rich sunshine Through the grape-arbor falling fills the porch, Temple and colonnade, fills the far hills Purpled and all yon summer-shimmering city With steadfastness of saintly aureole stream d 14 A MEMORIAL Through and through : atmosphere of peace and truth, Feel how the pure forms fill the world with wonder More than a summer s sun. Feel how the day Floods face and figure of them mutely there With meaning more than mere memorial. Dream on the peaceful scene of serious faith Steadfast and luminous and lovely, flooding The world with beauty of religion. Dream Real the loved presence of the steadfast dead SUFFERANCE AND one, tumultuous, wail d through bursting tears: " Lord, is this she ? " And one made stifled moan With hot, dry agony of desperate gaze. And one beside the bed, impetuous, dropp d Floor-flung with sweat and passion-prayer of soul Rigidly, terribly beseeching ; each, Each heart a desolation newly-made, Grief lone, full to the fashion of each strength. But one, and he the eldest, deepliest bow d By his world s weight half-broken yet though brave In whose heart burden of the loss to bear Were anguish d most ; he whom his gentlest frame Seem d least fit to sustain in grief s first fall ; He but stoop d low and kiss d her where she lay Newly dead ; mildly laid upon her lips Love s benediction, faith s finality : "Yea, this is she. There can come no grief now, No loss." Then he stood quiet in the midst As death ; fearing not life nor anything. 16 "MARIAE NASCENTI" HOW but the stone aspires ! See huge and high, What lift to the great groins ; how tiptoe stand Pillar and pinnacle and minaret Intent on heaven-attaining : stalwart still, Buttress d and bearing well the weight of a world Which broods on Milan ! And above these far, Ay, beyond Milan as an ice-robed Alp, Even above best reach of saint on saint However pedestalPd, the golden maid, Of God the Mother, dominant of all 1 It is a work of ages when the world Was very sure of aspiration ; when Men slaughter d, tortured, buttressing a faith Which tower d serene beyond mere mundane ways Of firm foundation ; when the power of earth, The stony-heartedness of things, seem d but The more assurance of a love vouchsafed Beyond earth-intimation. Then the stone Stone still and needing to be buttress d well, 17 EARLIER POEMS Toil d-in for centuries; ay, fretted, chased With ingenuity of much disguise Leap d yet a wan, white flame : its smoke, the clouds Even of God s footstool ; and its flower and birth The Mother-Maiden, pinnacled of all. Now are we not so sure. Our warranty Absolves not slaughter. Though we work ; and some Have solace, learning of a faith that builds No altars ; nay, nor longer needs to build. Our faith is not a stone, nor our new Christ Born of an idol eminent o er all. Yet are there hours when we would fain be sure, Have stones that we might buttress ; but to be Certain of aspiration ; not as now Mute for the fear we would not speak aright. Yea, is this temple for a mummery ? Are stones, that leap and lift with yearning, tombs Of a dead passion and a soul that was ? Is there no faith which Milan may today Feel vaulted, groin d and pinnacled ; no Love High over Milan ? 18 "MARIAE NASCENTI" In this vast, dim place A woman crouch d ; ah, with an usual need Of intercession ; at the least, a want Of heart-salvation ! And within her soul (Her intimate estimate of many things Their mutual ministry each truth to each), Even through the mockery of those stone lips Of hers, which mean not : may not meaning be Of pillar, groin and lifted vault, of saint And saint on pinnacle all buttress d well And chased with labor of old years of hope When strength abounded hero, sage and saint, Angels and then the stars : and, in the midst, With world-inviting arms compassionate The Christ-Child Mother : Minister of all ? KARNAK THIS, then, is Karnak. From without her walls Come sounds of man and beast ; but from within, None. If beyond her gateways there be green Groves and the silver of wide streams, within Are none. But stones are here yet, huge and stark And silent in their ruin; only stones. What homely noise ascends into the air From earth around : the croon of doves, and chant Of sudden cockrels ; all the dooryard sounds Of humble husbandry ! And thence the cry Of children, naked as the dust, at sport. Thence, too, the lilt and strange, wailing refrain Of boys who bear in baskets the dark loam (And they can dig but sphinxes to the light!) Fresh from a bank-side. Or above these all An ass, his sufferance failing, speaks at last That agony of utterance of his. Such are the sounds ; with overhead the scream Of vulture, owl or hawk who find delight, 20 KARNAK Refuge and home in ruin. But within Is silence like eternity ; and stone. Ay, and about this mighty death-mask lies Yon lustrous circlet of the youngest green That grows by gift of Nile. And, on beyond The circuit of where once was Thebes, uprear Cliffs that are catacombs of kings; whereby One sees a temple to greet Karnak still Through ruin ; or, mere flecks upon the plain, Memnon s colossi gazing eastward yet Though sight was long since reft them, and their dawn Leaps not that gave them voice. And these are not Thebes nor eternity, but tombs and stone Tottering in ruin. Nothing that was built Lives; only lives the young spring everywhere. Though these were builded for eternity, These stones ; to sun s praise whilst the sun be lord! Thebes, to be Thebes an if the heavens fall ! Lo ! the day lingers. These vast arches stretch Purpling their shadows; and themselves grow gold. And somewhat of the sky seems strewn among 21 EARLIER POEMS Their fallen. And the sun-rays stream a strength To build up Karnak : and the place is whole. Yon black-stoled verger seems at sacrifice With incense certainly world s parasites That pester are not here : but only I With Pharaoh s children and a thousand thoughts How Egypt still were Egypt I alone Weeping in Karnak! For we now who build Have knowledge how our building, though of stone, Earns not eternity. And we are come Since Pharaoh s hour through many a wanton hope Of other-worlds, back to men s earth at last, Faithless of any other earth whereon To build us temples ; seeking only now To build, if build we must, not out of stone Nor to eternity unless today Fore-hold tomorrow ; save the life of things Be proven in dying; and our conscience of Ruin be resurrection. So we stand Weeping in Karnak for the faith of kings. 22 THE TOMBS OF THE KINGS AT THEBES HERE are world s portals to the underworld. For I have been and seen and am come back ; And, being returned, must speak of what I saw. The entrances are downward ; and the ways Darksome : but still the scenes set by the way Are like to those of earth if not so fair. Merely, tis night; the sun, an orb of dusk. And these are ghost-things merely and not men : Though looking like them, yet lacking their life. For earth is pictured merely, not unlike That Theban river-plain beyond the hills Where life is teeming : only, not alive. And at the core this strange-hewn underworld Is of the desert rocks above it, whence The corpse was carried to abide below Eternally beneath them. Nought is here Unearthly : only, earth is here like death. Even the perpetuity is just Earth s desert seeming-perpetuity 23 EARLIER POEMS Where change were slow, none less than elsewhere sure, And time s eternity less subtly fill d With values born of mutability In conscienced apperceptions among men. Therefore am I come back, having been and seen How wholly worthless were an underworld. We, who have learn d how night and day but prove Sun s single course ; how spirits still are men ; And conscience, all-time ; need no longer dig World s exit downward. But have been and seen And are return d, each hour; by every breath. 24 ABU SIMBEL THERE is an hill hath open d out its heart Unto the sun of each advancing spring Through many thousand ages of delight With wonder and with sweetness mightily ; A temple and an habitation of The dignity and wonder of all things. Kings were its acolytes. And at its gates Colossi, clothed in sweetness as in strength, With sacred wonder at the world gave guard ; Declaring, even by beauty more than bulk, The splendor of that hill s unaltering faith From everlasting. And the infinite Succession of the days and nights ; the flush Of dawn upon that portal ; and the rich, Mysterious meaning of the moon ; have yielden Unto those giant wardens something of A wisdom earn d of large experience Regarding earth : of ever-murmuring Nile And the still orbit of the Nubian hills. EARLIER POEMS Stars lent their lustre. And a nightingale Hath sung (or haply he may so have sung As now) through every twilight. That those forms Have scarce been cognisant how from their midst One form hath shattered groundward ; have not seen How their sole hill alone, of all those hills Which seem d so human, e er had any heart To open at the springtime ; nor have felt How kings have ceased to kindle in that fane Incense of splendor ; how the sweetness of Those inner chambers hath given space to dust; And only beasts inhabit. Nor have known How sand like snow lies drifted round that hill Tawny and savage, swart and desert gray. 26 THE SCULPTURES OF ABU SIMBEL, WITHIN NOT for thy victories, nor for this vast, Vainglorious temple in entirety (Though that were somewhat, Ramses !) but for this Innermost chamber, that last sanctuary Wherein abide the best of Egypt s gods ! What though thy figure undivine must sit Beside great Thebes , beside great Memphis God And Him Who lights the world ? We leave thee this The last infirmity of kings ; and thank thee Still for that inner chamber in the rock. There, all were holy, Ramses ; nay, even thou ! There ; where the bats inhabit and the owl Finds not enough of starlight ; where no air From any wandering, desert puff of wind Disturbs the settling of the sifted dust ; There, though as in crumbling bands bitumen-swathed, Nigh lasteth a religion, elsewhere nought ; A power and a passion and a spirit 27 EARLIER POEMS Ptah and Harmachis, yea, and Amen-Ra Which needed but some self-divinity (Nay, Ramses, no divinity of kings !), Some insight of our soul-unendingness (Conclusiveness by all-time sympathy, Scarce as by an endurance which is not) ; To move and hold the world unto this hour. Call thee a man, humble and fain to sit In dust and darkness, featureless and worn, Though, even by virtue of appreciant doubt, Faith-hearted to move heaven to help the world ; Call thee a Christ : and earth were saved anew ! Men can earn conquests over desert hordes Now as in thy time, Ramses ; men might boast Vainglorious, forsooth, almost as thou. Thy gods, thy pettier godship, were not so Efficient to restore the world. And yet Step from this chamber, Ramses ! Our estate Hath need of men like thee, at worst, with faith In worth and warrant ; who, at worst, accept (Wiselier than thou and humbly thus the more !) 28 THE SCULPTURES OF ABU SIMBEL, WITHIN Responsibility through all they do. Thou hadst no doubts of thine efficiency To build a holy place unto all time, God-like to stand accountable at last ! Though is earth doubting still beyond this rock. And lo ! even now her doubt (that sympathy, That soul, of best belief !) is visiting What else were sepulchre ! The springing sun Casts one clear shaft past archway, pillar, hall ; And penetrates thy tomb and turns this stone To triumph. Shall the momentary beam Provoke no stirring of these senseless things That thou hast wrought thee ? Shalt thou let the world Learn thee too late, learn thee but to bemoan The inestimable error thou hast made ? Shall sun disclose his children wholly dead ; To leave thee lost ; for lands that knew thee not ? Wake, Ramses ! Let there be one man of faith ! 29 KERRERI ABOVE, a pitiless burning ; and below, The burnt earth ; here and there a mockery, Some dream of the desert that the blue above Were fallen and found unscorching : but the truth Is bitter ; and the stones are blistering. Yet were it rather that earth s sufferance Is ended and her agony endured. Earth is not sleeping now : but only dead . Earth had a grisly dream, a gaunt debauch Of truculent riot in the name of God, A furious lechery of faith ; and here Awoke in death-throes. Tens of thousands slain Witnessed the cataclysm. And the sun Burnt the bones bare and left them where they lie : All in the name of God ; the false report Of one who cried : " God cometh to demand That all men through the mouth of me, His mouth, Worship with one voice ; through the hand of me Smite with one sword." The unity-of-God 30 KERRERI Were not an unity of creed ; the cult Of faith, not formal. The monotony Was death, not life. And earth was drench d in blood. So serve we somewhat faith by bathing earth In blood, by lying and by lechery, Through each the darkness of his loneliness Bewilderment begot of love and need. So, by the failure of the singleness Of creed, best prove we truth s totality As we are each and several : God , the whole By virtue but of multiplicity In heart-belief, each heart unto himself. Then the sun comes and burns the bones of men Bare where they lie ; and earth lies ashenly Dead ; save for some uncertain dream of blue Fallen here, yon, nay, everywhere about : As though the sky were found unblistering. "OH, TO WHOM?" THOU woman, beautiful and glad and kind As love s own soul ! Thou wonderful and wise, Silently smiling for such sun, such shine Of blue sky, green sea and the wide, white sand ; Like sunshine smiling, like this crystalline Beauty and wonder of the clean, warm world; Thou, sitting silently and smiling ; thou, Perfect, a world to worship, power and peace Call d woman, and divine peace in thine eyes, Peace in thy pure smile and thy smooth, wide brow And in thy form, flesh moulded without flaw : Thou, peace ! And I may sit beside thee thus Worshipping silently (yet smiling too) Thee, of thy world ; and wonder that the day Can hold divinity so worshipful, Even this deep-eyed, crystalline, soft day Contain within its world more worshipful A world than clouds or sky or sands or ocean, Containing thee. I so may sit and smile Silently. And if silence seem to me 32 "OH, TO WHOM?" Someway not all our hearts were made for ; when Some hour I needs must yearn to speak, pour forth The worship that is in me, praise aloud This wonder and this richness of all things ; Make known the marvel that thou art : made known That, hearing, thou mayest grow more glad for worship Musical, universal, reverent Of all thou art ; if sometimes silence seem Miscomprehension, unlike lucid love ; If life necessitate a speech and motion, O thou divine, shalt thou not hearken, lift My life to level of thy truth of love ? Nay : for thou feelest all, feeling full love Speechless for perfect commune. Shall I need Rebuke, refusal of mere hearkening To voice of mine ? Else, learn in silence here Divinely so to smile in mute content ? Dear, I am no dead god to feel thy beauty Of earth and air and ocean and of thee, Nor passionately burst in speech, pour praise Unto this firmament of sands and ocean, 33 EARLIER POEMS Sun, clouds and skies, all thee ; speak passionately World s divine-human love and longing forth Large as I may ! Lo ! that thou wilt not hearken, Hearken, is grief too great. I am a man. 34 A DIALOGUE " LOOK, love, where easternly beyond yon isle Glows the gold moon ; and all the wave between Is saffron. And a flush of westering day Tints opal the near face of things : these tops Of forest which from this wild eminence Slope seaward ; oaks and many a towering pine. And these are voiceful with the serious speech Of this soft west-wind from the after-day, A murmur and a whispering musicwise Like wash of tone-tint widely through the night. These are the sights and sounds. Look, love ; and hear That we may seriously and like some cloud Receive into our hearts this solemn light Of aftermath ; and in our still night-souls Be luminous, brooding o er land and sea. Fancy the fate of him who as a cloud Not luminous but utterly alone Misses or sun or day-responsive moon ; Floats fed but by the stars ; love, feel for him. 35 EARLIER POEMS We are not like him. We are like yon cloud Which, fed by stars at will, receives none less Into its heart this solemn aftermath Of sun and of the sun-responsive moon ; Still sweeping seaward with the soft west-wind." " We are not like him. Would we were more like ; In this our hour of solemn marriage-rite Of earth, air, ocean, night or day, more like His nobler loneliness, the absolute poise Of him star-speculant, sublimely sole. He in his loneliness sublimity Is star-stuff, yea, and night and day ; alone Earth, ocean, sun and moon unto himself As were not we, for all night s serious vow. Would (almost !) each alone were self-sufficed ! " " Nay, love ; but were not our sufficiency Still his, his most, more self-sufficient, but By being, beyond his insight, through and through A sweet supremacy, a focusship, Worldhood and unioning of things that are A DIALOGUE (Ay, who, but such as we, might be assured ?) Beyond his ken who lonelily alone Unions but less of world ; hath comradeship With stars, maybe, yet only by some vague, Unhuman half-light indistinctively Of reference in soul to earth or ocean, Dayspring or day-responsive moon ? Ah, love, For we are All-sublimity ; are one With self-completion. And the star-fed soul Is God but in and through our holier heart. Look, love, where easternly yon moon responds The sun-love; and all earth and ocean, air, Daylight and night-light in yon cloud between Are bosom d, luminous on the west-wind." 37 MELOSPIZA FULL in my front, straight to the sun he sang His song. And I have heard ; and comprehend. There is no wonder in the world like this, The supreme art-achievement. Love he sang. And in so singing synthesized a world ; Symphonized utterly an universe. Plainly. An inconspicuous, small bird Mottled and fluff d of plumage, here and there Streak d chestnut on an undertint of gray. Calmly. A brisk impertinence tongue-tied By dint of bustle, of an agile, deft, Impudent robbery of sod-hid seed. Softly. A rustling in the brush, beneath Old, autumn, dead things and the tangled stems Of storm-thresh d vineries. When suddenly A flutter and leap ; and plump upon one stretch Of naked twig aloft at level of My moveless eye, and breath-to-breath with mine Unwhispering lips ; close, so that sun and sky 38 MELOSPIZA Sphered us two as one centre ; in the splendor Of spring-shine and the quivering atmosphere He sang. Three flute-notes and a warble, a trill Of half one hurried instant: and twas done. T was done. The full throat and the vibrant tongue, The sky-directed, open gape were proved If just by their infinitesimal Focusship fix d of universal sky, Of sun and earth, spring and the singing soul My soul, mine intimate vitality! Ay, for I heard ; and comprehend and worship For art-achievement in an absolute love. 39 II POEMS OF NATURE MID-MAY LIFE is too young, the sap and song of it, For quiet, firm, robust philosophy, Mid-solstice of the million-marvell d mind ; Too young for ripe solidity mature Of the midsummer s noon. But sap with song Leaps to the making of maturity, Surges and swells and bursts in million-marvell d Newness of swift growth tremulous for delight ; Half -wondering for the evanescence ; strong Yet tender, delicate-leaved ; weak miracle For gossamer, green, soft subtlety of strength. Spring leaps mature in many a marvell d meaning Of mid-solstitial symphony to-be ; Spring leaps mature ; even as solidity Rich of midsummer s noon and firm, robust, Full chord of green-grown June s self-questioning Interprets still but spring, but sap and song And poesy young of May s old miracle. Life is too young to feel life s age-completion Complete in world s new youth. But sap with song 43 EARLIER POEMS Show substance of June-felt maturity. How feel philosophy alive, save song Leap to be sap and surge and bloom of it ? How sing, save strong in million-marvelPd mind ? Wherefore be song philosophy s fit speech ! Wherefore let spring sing, meaning the full June ! Ay, all the year s in each least blossoming ; All the world, all the search of soul that seeks, In every flower and blade and budded sheaf Of the young-grass d lowland and the shimmering, Gossamer woods ; ah ! all the power of proof In the weak, tentative unfolding ; truth Through the frail metaphor ; fragility Year-universal by the throb of it ! There are fluff d ferns unfolding their soft fringe Of feathery fronds beneath the cool May-wind Low-linger d over the marsh ; or, mid dank mosses Where wind nor sun save fitfully falls in, Uncurling palely their pearl-featured front Spread backward-broad to feast and fill from air Full of their verdure of the massier June 44 MID-MAY Mature. For t is the richness of the brake To-be that makes the meaning beautifullest Of the May-swamp. And unto the May-swamp New notes, like delicate dew or sun-shower spray d Liquid-cool from the myriad-moted beam Aslant, fall flowery from the bough where birds Make sound of the sap-music in May-mind, Make bubbling, overbuoyant blossoming (Well-ware how blossom-burst and lilt of tune Bring the blush d fruit; unware how ripe-juiced fruits, Seeded, eternalize but vernalhood) For steep d cells and the fibrous strength to-be ; For world s truth, universe of throat s own tune. How should the May-bloom cease ; how, the furr d fern Desiccate to a stiff senility, Spring-song turn fruitage and through fruit decay ? How, poesy age as to philosophy ? For the very seeding, for the forward pulse Of fresh sap, fresh song ; for the vitalizing Through all the veins of fresh, succeeding spring Of a new meaning ! Firm philosophy, Fact-conscious foliature of grown June-time 45 EARLIER POEMS (Yielding to mirth and marvel of May-mind Meaning for miracle) needs yet miracle, Spring-heart, spring-hope, spring-innocence anew Fresh out of fountains of its past-won faith Year after year ; that so, by pulsing back Through fall and fall, ever the new-won faith Of June shall live not sole by memory, live In heart s upsurging of ensuant spring Perpetually ; that spring to spring shall be Ever ascension, integrated growth, Fulfilment loftier of less-prophecy, Live reconciliation through dead June. E en as May-song, made meaning, fruits and fades In wisdom of the million-marvell d mind ; E en as world s poesy grows mature, truth-stale Philosophy ; so truth world-conscious seeds Self-life in death of the world ; so to spring ever Poesy, rich innocence, beauty more and more ! SPIRIT CLOUDS cool and luminous-moist as moonbeams float Pale, liquidly, in morning ; and cool rain Falls shadowy here and there down through the blue, Down on the dew-cool d, morning green below Of the new woods ; that in the rays of the sun Earth, clouds, soft rain, dew-mists and verdure gleam A freshness and an inward lucency ; Sunshine in earth as earth in sunshine shown. Out of the cool-blown, moon-like clouds the rain Drops on the luminous land ; that the wet land Sparkles in sun s quick beams, each bud and blade, Briar and bloom d tree-top bejewelPd bright ; Each bud by focus of enorbing drop Sphering the sunrise, each a full world-dawn ; Each bud and blade a life, a full, small world, Cosmos enorb d in cosmos, sphering so Beauty complete, organic, self-sustain d In every heart through inference of all. 47 EARLIER POEMS T is a day-dawn of beauty through all things. Lush meadows, emerald-sheen d in morning, slope Velvet with undulation soft, spread wide To slant beams of the sun ; or, in the gloom And shadowing of the eastward forests, purpled : Each blade an inference organic through Sunshine and rainbow d mist wide atmosphere And the still-dropping rain and clouds and sky Contributors to beauty of each blade : Spiritual so. (And shall not these weak sheaths Exude new moisture, new-breathed atmosphere, New clouds and rain again that grass shall grow ?) - Behold the borders of the wood : low stems Lean toward the meadows and the cloud-canopies Above in the sun ; they burst, and from their buds Spread tissuey the translucent, web-like leaves Frail, gloss d and hovering on the waft of the air For buoyancy and nurture. These by need Of the foster-rain and of the stimulant shine Are whole and beautiful and spirit-real For power through dependence, organized Sustainment through such instability ; 48 SPIRIT Mutual want; reciprocal, sweet need ; Drinking in, drawing up, amalgamating Moisture and pasturage to breathe again An atmosphere out into the young noon ; By metamorphosis one mutual self. Nor is the unioning in beauty, self Organic of the maybuds, otherwise, Which through the pine-sod pierce ; anemones Of crimson d youth and age-blanch d flower, the yellow Lily calPd adder s-tongue that to the rain Flutters and trips with leaf s smooth, mottled wing. And the clean, cup-like blooms of shrubb d blueberries Or wildly-delicate columbine none less Drink in and render forth through the wide air Sweet interchange of pasture and of health. To name the multitudinous upspringings Organic of new, morning beauty (life Of the whole world in each conglobing whole, Each cosmos through each cosmos) were a work Of wonder without end. Lo ! the tall trees Are blithe of blossoming, are amber, golden, Purplish and crimson ; tremulous, faint pink 49 EARLIER POEMS Against the high clouds shimmering ; or, within The sun-deep, sapphire, cool sky-spaces, glowing In marvel indescribable for spirit Drinking in, breathing out, over the earth. Even brown loam and gray-faced rock in the sun Are drinking, rendering, organic by A chemic congruence of elements : Whole beyond bound in cosmos, everything ! For all the world is morning-whole in beauty Spiritual for new breath perpetually ; Infinite for inversely-infinite Organization within organism, Self-world-determination. Lo! for sun Manifests sun by atmosphere and earth ; Earth, self-seen in the sunshine, through each growth Knoweth a cloud-fluidity in all : Conclusive as the soul, being one therewith. SOUL THERE is intensest heat thrill d through all earth Quivering, reeking with sun-saturate, Upshimmering redolence ; scent smoke-like steaming From all leaf-pores of forest and of field Up through the tremulous, fervent atmosphere From earth as for wide altar, incensewise Spread through the cloudless heaven s hot vault to veil The presence of the omnipotent, to hide Splendid beneficence would burn too bright ; Though to the veil d face of the god earth s prayer Is green and soft and glad to gaze upon. Incense earth offers ; for the power of the sun Thrills into strength a thousand thousand things, Flared fires of sap-life lifting everywhere Green tongues of lambent, gleam d fervidity Up out of smouldering rock and loam and mould With odorous fume and pungency of blaze Revivified. For everything of earth Lives but by interchange of strength for strength EARLIER POEMS Now most, through springtime for such strength of the sun; Now most, when yet an incense in hot haze Veils the strong sun ; now most, when interchange Of breath for breath, of blaze for blaze, half -hides The fountain of high fire : yet hides not him. For earth s affinity, by aureole Flared up to sun s affinity (exchange Of fire for fire, of immanent return From flame s effulgence for effulgent gift Immanent) makes of sun, earth, atmosphere One mutualism ; makes of odorous woods, Reek d fields and furrow d, fumed plough-land fit figure Of facts infinity by interflux Nor god nor creature, prayer nor incense teeming From earth to earth s omnipotent; but incense, Prayer, praise or love the omnipotent, whose sphere Is day, spring s mutual interflux of flame. WHITSUNTIDE THROUGH many days endured a drouth : the heavens Heartless, serene, smiled sneeringly ; no soul Shone in the shallow, clear, untroubled sky Of sympathy, no shade of sorrowing For sun-scorch d earth ; but day by day the sun Flared white-hot on the wound of earth to blister, Cauterize but not cure the searching sore ; And the dry moon came dewless to day s thirst. And ceaseless prayer with fervid sacrifice To the hard heavens from earth sent incense up, Meek exhalations from the bosom of Ocean and fever d lake and languid stream, Propitiation by burnt-offering steam d Of earth s best moisture for the softening Of dry heaven s hard heart ; even the parch d fields Exuding a crisp, sere self-sacrifice Each of its best. And yet the drouth endured. Not by the plaint and painfulness of earth Seem d the high, hard, dread heaven s heart stirr d. But swift 53 EARLIER POEMS Came there between the heaven and the earth A great, moist wind from the cloud-regions over The south sea and beyond the horizon-zone, Alive ; a great, wing d spirit outspread between Dead heaven, dead earth, and reconciling both Into one heart and hope ; being born of both, By mutual wonder-woof half-witlessly Of prayer and prayer s acceptance. Though the heavens Seem d to deny and knew but to deny Earth s prayer, and earth but helplessly to plead In isolation utmost each from each ; Yet was the heaven s heart open d though he knew not, Open d by pity whilst he yet denied, Open d for incense and burnt sacrifice Mingled beneath the heavens over the earth ; That, when world s great wind came leaping, alive, Up from the regions of the oceans, far, From the cloud-chambers of the envaulting vast, Was the world ripe for its awakening : rain Pour d from the turbid, piteous skies down on 54 WHITSUNTIDE The faint earth through the bosom of the breathing Of the great, moist, live wind. And there is laughter Now of near sun in heaven ; now upon earth Green things drink in and feed upon and fill with Power and perfection of wet warmth inflow d : New life, new interchange; dead poles call d heaven And earth, proved tropic, axial from the first As now ; in gyre of rain s quick pantheism Their spirit, one great, moist wind infusing all. 55 SPRING-MOON THERE is moon-motion through the living night, Moist and awake with all sweet, wandering scents And whisper of the washings of the wind. Here is some shelter. But above (beyond These needle-muffling pines, this siffling sway Of silvery, slim leaves of the gleaming oak And tender-poised, new, delicate, lithe birch) Is a wild, wing d sea-wind fill d with the moon And murmur and moisture of the moon-soak d sea ; An ocean-nurtured, strong wind, salt and laden With flowery, fresh breath of the bursting foam ; A wide wind soaking-up the spume of ocean, Sucking-in, drawing-down and sweeping-on Moon-moisture over the dim, silver d land. And like the motion and slow murmuring of Moon-saturated ocean are the music Rhythmical of the shadowy woods ; the mist-wove Pulsings poetic of the gossamer grass Dank through the fields ; to metrical sweep of the wind 56 SPRING-MOON Nodding (like dance and dive of moonbeam-frosted, Drift-foam) in orbited elasticity, Fleck d on the undulating bend and lift Of the wash d field-floor beneath the ocean-wind. For, in the potence of the fair, fresh moon And of the moon s moist wind, all land like sea Is tremulous, surgent as with whisperings faint Of moonbeams blown like summer-wandering dews Through the bland air and over earth and ocean One luminousness, as of night alive. 57 QUIET AN odor as of moonbeam-blossoms, scent Of the sweet, white moon through the moveless leaves Falling and feasting well the dreaming world With perfume, with the dew-mild, cool delight Of apple-bloom, fogg d grass, liquidity Of purplish lilacs, sensuous breathings forth Amingle with the moon to seem its soul, An effluence and a fluorescence floated Mistily languid through wan atmosphere A moth with fluff d whirr of his soft, furr d wings Wanders awide and vaguely ; in moonlight Visible like some indolent apple-blossom Lifting and falling loose through the still air. It is a picture of the purest peace, Yet fill d with pulsing life. Dew, moon and flowers, Fogg d grass and perfume and the languorous moth Are peaceful, beautiful but by their breathing Of light, of moisture, sound or sweetness forth : Each heart and life a focussing for life 58 QUIET Of all hearts else ; dew, moon and flowers and moth In almost-silence yet a power, a peace Alive as peace is world-whole passioning Equable ; liquid effluence mutually. 59 FORCE A STRONG wind as of winter is awild Through the warm, summer woods, urgent, compelling Green boughs to utterance of music, moving The sun-world with emotion to a song. Even the moist underwood is scattering too Dew-pearls and dew-toned, liquid notes along The flood of the vigorous air. And flower and fern, Brimm d of sweet incense and bewilder d over With honey-wine, spill largess of their marvel On the damp floor of the forest ; that the wind Is rhythmic for the throb of metrical drops Pulsating, pattering, and for swirl of boughs Blade-laden with a pendulous foliage. Earth Is one rich plash, rich wavering of plumes Through the green wood- world. And tree-tops above Are chanting like a sea, with gusty, seething Sweep of the pine-caps and the tufted surge Of frothy hemlocks, with the burst of oak Rough as of heavy foam on rocks. The woods Above, below are wroth like a wild sea 60 FORCE Green, strenuous-voiced ; with flashings of a spindrift Spray d, sun-spark d from the leaf-liltings and quick shafts Of sunshine darting into the dim depths. The woods are all one ocean-voiced, plumed bird, One feathery-foliaged ocean greenly gleam d. And blown birds from the shoals of such a seething Wing a wide way out over this green ocean With froth-like whirl beyond the hoary burst Of the boughs, birds swept and windily battling with The ponderous air and with the driven foam Below or driven flecks of the flurrying cloud Swirl d through the blue above. And the sun s light Flashes from their gloss d wings as from the leaf-gust Of the flashing forest or the sea s sun-soak d spray. For ocean under the gale is a spume-forest Full-leaved and lusty-bough d, streaming awide To stress of the sounding wind and steep d in light Deep to the roots of the quick-rifted waves Gale-concaved. And the sea s bursting boom of boughs Makes music of motion like the land s own voice. That blown sea and blown land like great, glad birds 61 EARLIER POEMS Are battling in their beauty, battling with Their spirit of the blue sky, whose life and motion Makes of all things a musiounioning ; With the free spirit of yon swift-off-sweeping storm Whose wintry-molten breadth beneath the sun Flows down the east, withdrawing gloriously As from a world for a world s work done abiding Still in the world by world s work done ; by waking Morning to poetry ; earth, sea or sky To bird-like animation metrical ; To beauty of blithe unrest and sunshine wild. 62 MIDSUMMER IT is the unreap d season when the fields Are flood-tide high, are flush and mildly misted Over with moonlight-film of silver seed In the glumed beard and pollen-laden sheaf. There is no glared, keen, crude intensity Of heat s excessive zeal ; but mellowness Serene in a replete maturity ; No lavish-loose voluptuousness, no riot Wanton nor waste of the world s strenuous strength ; But bland mobility of throbb d repose, Firm pulse of power self- whole and self-possess d. It is the long-grass d season. Multitude Of sun-suffused, soft, moonlight-misted life Dwells in the fields : the purple-globed, cool clover Fluid to flux of the breeze ; and fluorescent, Wing d irises, blue-bird-like, lucent-vein d Liquidly fluttering brooding through the noon To surface-swell and ripple of wind- wash d green. And red wood-lilies preen and peer upon 63 EARLIER POEMS These people of the deep from the safe shore Firm-footed ; while along the grass-lapp d land Freshly luxuriate in the solstice surge Meshes of undulating vine, convolved With roses, lapsing gleams of the June foam : All rich, reposeful in mobility, Mildly mature as a midsummer s moon. And moonbeam-blossoms umbellate of elder Canopy the dim deepness of the grass To twilight coves, whose echoey, lisping murmurs Whisper the stirring of the heart of the weed ; Where the dwarf d cornel and stout pulpit-plant Take root and cling within the wash of the tide. Here are the many-finger d, legg d and finn d Creatures of shallow seas whom the rank flood Cramps in their cavern-quarters : dusk-eyed moths Dreaming away world s plenitude of light ; Sheath d beetles busiest foraging ; blue wasps Drifting and darting, shivering the vague fern ; And warm bees walking in the bottom-weed For chillness and relief to laden wing. And suddenly some lithe leviathan, MIDSUMMER Scale-coiPd in forest-fastness of dun earth, Starts, slides and sweeps off into the unreap d Beyond, beneath sun s sooth deliciousness ; Leviathan, startling the sloth of the wave, Churning to spume, glint-bubbled blanch of spray, The swiftness of his thridded path and leaving Flexures subsiding wide along the shore And voice of heart of the grass in hollow cave. Spiders spin too from crest to crest of the green, Wind-wavering ocean net-like, filmiest traps To stay wing d things to prey upon ; but beams Of the hazed, opal noon show these one sheen Pale, iridescent as of sea s concaves At midnight ere the moon is at the wane. It is the flood-tide season. The flush d fields Follow the fulness of the sun ; as ocean Floods to the following of a summer s moon. And the mild moon mature, when sun descends, Glows mellowly up out of the dun east Over the moonlight-film d and silvery-seeded, Glumed beard and pollen-bristling sheaf of the grass ; 65 EARLIER POEMS The cool, wide moon ; a silvery, gentle spirit Bland, liquid-firm as solstice-flowering fields Or moon s own ocean s luminous, molten flood ; A power ; a multitudinous repose Of beams in rich, replete mobility. 66 MORTMAIN MOUNTAINS, and fog enveloping : the hills Invisible, save near and yon an height Bald, desolate, primeval peering up To level of this desert pinnacle, Swathed about by impenetrable mists Of ocean ; an impervious, vague drift Up from the unseen ocean-welteringness World nullified, made emptiness anew. World was not alway so. One hour agone Glow d the clear concave high of sparkling, clean And vivid sunshine ; far beneath, the sea In blue-bright, silver panoply outspread With glittering isles and shimmering sails athwart These mountain-bases ; and these forest-hills Radiant of verdure in all marvel-shapes Of summer splendidness beneath the sun Steam d odorous, alive with bloom and bird. Nor in this solitude of stagnant fog Is world below quite breathless ; for a fume Of pleasant, spruce-wild, honey-tingling scent EARLIER POEMS Steals upward mingling with the moisted salt ; And the voice of a bird, the tinkling, bell-toned tongue Of the thrush, upbubbling from the dead of the deep, Mounting and thrilling-through the void of the sky Till the vast and vault are heart and breast of him ; Till all the misty nothingness, denuded, Nebulous, old obscurity seems full To overflowing of the swelling hills Still verdure-vivid, of the radiant sea And sparkle of the blue and breath of the green. World-vacancy, how world-impossible ! Ever some pinnacle, some isle above Fog-oceans, sole-surveyor of the deep, For whom indeed the dark shows visible ! Hark ! and the bird-song ! Soft ! The breath of the pine ! 68 NOON ENDLESS an hoary-hearted, gray-grown sea Bursts on the gaunt, gray sands : an aged shore Strengthless and sapless in a withering glare, Stiff-baked and parch d save for the beating, salt, Sere surge of ocean. And a ghostly presence Of gray-grown mists from grizzled sands and gaunt, Foam d ocean fumes and stealthily out over The young, green land through earth s sunshine is spread A shroud and sepulchre morn-saturate, Sepulchring, saturating world s sunshine. Gray vapors so from borders of old ocean Brood above land s young, green futurity Where crops are ripening, broad with gossamer breath Through filmy oat-fields whose fresh-seeded husks Hang pale in tassell d tremulousness. The mists Make summer-sea-like the tall, pendulous oats. And undulations of soft breath of the beach Pass, wave-pulsations, over the blown breadth 69 EARLIER POEMS Of bristling barley ; and of mellowing rye Trouble its tawny-hued fecundities As with heart-beatings of primordial floods Inheritant. And over the long grasses The beach-breath floats in foggy fleeces, shrouds Their shoal, warm surging to confound the fields With sea s horizon and the sphering sky. And along oozy watercourses, where The slack tide-inlet in the marsh absolves Its brackish blue, the white fog lingers, steep d In moist, hot sunshine and the glooming green, Making of marsh and fluid ooze an union, Sea both and shore : as newness of the world By perpetuity is endless eld ; Young, green land but as old, hoar-hearted sea : Land, all, or ocean ; sepulchred in mists Unioning, saturating world s sunshine. 70 MARSH-MUSIC A SONG of lands low-lying : moist July Ripe in repletion of green wilderness Grown rank and flowery fine ! The delicate iris Yields place to bright-spiked pickerel-weed. Wide lilies Spread open-bosom d to the quickening sun Abroad upon the blue-gleam d, molten pool. And flat, glazed pads bear burden of fat frogs. Fish leap. And many a purple, gauzy-vein d, Swift-hovering, darting dragon-fly makes flurry And film-like blur to brush the polish d bog; Evaporating (to a cobweb) imaged, Sheen d sky and bladed banks where on the banks Tall eupatorium twilight-pink, flat-cluster d Lifts dark its leafy stems. And sweet spiraea Weighs warm the luscious air with white, wan, weedy Odor of honey loved by butterflies. And song in succulent sunniness issues out From breath of the marsh in bubbling music. Birds , Bees , all quaint manner of insects notes, cicadas And shrill mud-crickets ; song spills everywhere EARLIER POEMS All over the land low-lying ripe in the sun ; Song, fine for purple and golden growth, for glory Of moisture and green, flowery wilderness. How make more joyous song than warm July ? 72 A CEREMONIAL VERSE HERE is wild altar. And an incense wreath d Of music melts along the envaulted, dim, Groin d dome above of canopied rib-boughs Shadowy : music of a myriad mild, Croon d wood-notes echoing cool through hollow dusk Of twilight leafage. Here are censer d voices Chanting their canon-strict, in consequence Symphonic, cloistral through the sacred shade : Tone-dedication to night s festival. And ritual service, for the sacrifice Of soul to soul in self-devotion, sings The bridal in the ceremonial scent Of pines aroma : monotone-response Low, broad, impassion d as of priest. Nor hush Of wing d assemblage through the serious aisles Is wanting for world s warrant ; to the vow Witness sufficient of the woods, with some Swift stir as of an eye to start and see. Bring to the bridal savor of sweet turf, Sanctity of soft moss, enveiling fern, 73 EARLIER POEMS Shrine of inwoven ivy ; consecrate Cool-chaliced nectar to the forest-font ; Bless these to furnish bridal. Be the breeze Murmurous not alone with wandering moth Nor muffled quite in dew ; that pendent boughs Above, beneath night-skies shall shake and show Luminous wonder and far worship, stars Of still fire flaring and some meteor-gleam, Flash d for life s secret of the mystery, Light s self-consuming ardor unconsumed. Bring these to blessing : for the bridal s breath Gives consecration; and earth s soul were whole. Here is wild altar ; and the nuptial earth Stands wedded ; for the wide world s want s assuaged, It is close-woven night. Rapt atmosphere Feels exhalation of atomic heart In heart, warm vapor within vapor, dew Globule to globule coalesced to seep Absolved of turf-pore through the spongy mould : Moisture in metamorphosis ; earth, air, The holier by precipitance and death : 74 A CEREMONIAL VERSE Perpetuation but by passage, pulse Out of old longings nebulous to new Marriage, completion in life s change and loss. So through the solemn forest : cell with cell Of veinous tissue, as with bridal s breath, Breaks to the impregnation, meek conceives Sap to the framing of ingenerate New cell leaf s reconciliation, life By procreant passing. And night s cloistral sound Vibrant, symphonic is but wedded voice Of chord-rasp d chord, transmuting throb of power To power s metempsychosis, act s relapse Dyingly distant, ever-widening sphere Of married molecules, an unioning Existent but by ceasing, on and on. What of the ritual of the flowers ? Shall moth, Nestling to nectar d lurement, bear on breast Fertility for sacrifice of sweet, Germinant potence of the seed to-be For rapine of heart s nurture ; and world s heart Not recognise seed s reconciling, right Exchange of death-through-life for life-through-death ; 75 EARLIER POEMS Not realize world-assurance for world-fear, Selfhood for isolation, consciousness Of love s divinity for love s dismay ? Bless to the bridal nought of earth ! Earth s soul Is wide-initiate in perpetual pulse Of union d passing, self-pre-bless d. World knows Meaning of spirit s mystery and might, Love s soul-virginity of sacrifice, Self-realization by devotion. All Is wild-wood altar. And the priestly earth Stands wedded. And the bridal earth breathes whole, CONSECRATION THE year fills to the fall. A frosty feel Clarifies air, precipitates all fume, Fever and frothing of earth s flood-tide time Down out of opal atmosphere ; that flowers And fields, brown-gold and mauve and neutral hues, Yet gleam gem-like and clean for crystalline Purification of the perfect world. It is earth s custom so to consecrate Life as by life s completion unto death ; Bring forth, bear beauty in fecundity ; Just for the absolute lustration, rich, Perfect, the ultimate passing. At this hour Of the first cold, crisp frostiness and fear For final dissolution, dwells all earth Never more open, placid-proud and pure, Firm in self-dedication : sanctity Virgin, of summer laid in fall s dead bed, Love s realization in life-sacrifice. The year flowers to the fall. Earth s consecration 77 EARLIER POEMS Is intimate achievement ; perfectness Earth s preparation for the backward thrust. Nowhere is any interstice ; but life Teems and is multitudinous. Earth s passing Shows fruitage, ripening, an actualizing Of spring s potential bud and blush ; of summer Love s realization in life-sacrifice. Autumn s are these grain d grasses ; autumn s too The feathery asters and sweet-breathing herbs ; Wild-helianthus, jewel-weed, the wand Of sunny succory ; and the garden-glow Of melon-blossoms, hollyhock, bright stock, Gay marigold. And autumn s lingering birds Call and are quoted by the echoey sky In quavering, clear contentment. Fall s cool clouds Are vivid, plume-like white, wing-like of motion Through the high, sapphire firmament. And stars By night are cold-distinct and tingling-crisp As not in the vague dusks of earlier year. For t is earth s absolute perfection, freedom Of world-rich, wonderful, wide fruitfulness ; Flower, field and leaf, wing d insect, worm or heaven 78 CONSECRATION Each at top-teeming of fecundity And all-appreciation functional ; Life at the crown-completion : even swoon d autumn Summer s strong wholeness and maternity Function-in-fulness of the organic year. The year yearns to the fall. Even as a bride Bowers in a beauty of lost virginity, Joy for love s power of sacrifice : so earth Feels death life s life ; and floods and fills with it. 79 RESIGNATION THE sun goes down on autumn s eldest day; And stars come ; and the immanence of night Droops over earth : and it is time to dream. Time is it now to dream and perfect place Where vastness only and enormous night Include and ordinate, so sanctify Vague gloom to solemn majesty ; when motion Stands even as if transmuted into thought ; And only hush d and high-starr d thought may take Breath of the serious breeze ; when night with autumn Broods and revivifies the various year. Nothing in bitterness ! Woods, nigh-denuded, In those slant, pale beams of the morning sun Have sparkled blithe with brittlest rime of frost As though twere springtide and the dew-dawn. Oaks Have flared a still-insistent flame ; thin beech Glow d coppery as the bronze-smoked sky, more warm Than bloom of mellowing rye-field when the year Was newly motherhood. And sinuously 80 RESIGNATION The fold-on-fold of vine, in cataract Froth -figured, wave-like curl to rays of the sun, Saffron and amethystine, wonder-flush d With glad glimpse of the orange-scarleted, Bold berries in between. Are such the shades Of death-dismay for passing of the year ? And day s own dying ! Shall the gorgeous glow Of the blood-flamed cloud-region and the arch d, Empyreal atmosphere and lambent, rose Heart-throbbing of the arteries of earth Seem absolute despair unspeakable, Irreparable for life s latest loss ? Nor year nor sun s at loss ; for these (by death Of their heart s daytide and the flower of earth) In feeling loss their law, transcend, absolve And render over unto light and lust Of spring s renewal and the dawn-to-be Life s inmost moment of the dearth in them. Still is it spring by autumn s dreaming ; still Remember d day made manifest in night. 81 THE BARBARIANS THE swart, strong mass of mountains couch d at eve For sleep profound and peace : their forest-flanks Velvet with long glance of an autumn sun Gold to the day-down ; and the twilight-shades At mute, enveloping ascent ; and air Lucent with purplish exhalation, sweat Of steam, moist breath from day s work done : rough hills Calm, mild, gigantic, utterly at ease ! And a mist-purpled pool with swart, smooth breast Mirrors those mountains in their mass ; a lair Of cool sweet-water to the thirst-lolPd tongue And sogg d hoof of the rough, gigantic hills. Swiftly the shades ascend ; the tawny-hued, Autumnal foliage of the mountain-flank Mellows to kindled amber ; burns ; is borne Down out of day like ash with weight of night. Till to day-gone a ghost comes ; opaline Fluorescence, quickening of the gradual moon ; A cold gleam from beyond the eastern ridge 82 THE BARBARIANS Phosphoric-thrill d as frost flared filmily Forth through the dusk : and day, asleep, hath dreams. Lo ! it is night upon the mountains, night White on the mists of mountain and of mere ; Night, with dominion of the enormous moon. Lo ! the swart, rough-hooved hills sigh deep and dream. Some owl hoots through the hollow night ; the boughs Of crisp, frost-crusted hemlock from the concave Of black moon-shade reecho hollowly The hoot; and chill cliffs all make cavern sound. Hark ! a loon laughs and laughs ; the peaks again Have dream, and mock as cold, harsh hills alone Laugh, wan with mists and moonlight ; and the frost Creaks in the keen fir-branches. A slow bird Heavily beating the mist-beams, with croak d, Uncouth cry from the uttermost frontier Wings loudening way ; that gutturally loud And more loud groan the gaunt, crouch d cliffs in dream. Some scared jay screams ; from vacant, drear oak-trunk 83 EARLIER POEMS Woodpeckers wail : the hoar hills scream and wail. Some deer stamps on the dull sod ; the hard thud Strikes flint, and shrieks ; and at the sudden speech Of rock-tongued headlands the buck bounds, betray d, Startled and snorting from the thicket, breasts With sparkling, seethy plunge and crackling crunch Through thin shore-ice, shattering the lake s glazed moon, Thrashing to myriad tinkling discs and shrill, Metallic phosphor the black deep. The steep And flinty-horn d, chill mountains clank like steel. Till on the night, heartening the old, cold moon To burden of yearning and her pulseless mists To motional effulgence, wakes a moan A mourning, mooting, lorn cacophony Monotonous from out the moss d morass : Night s longing both and loneliness intense Throbb d in the call. And those hoarse, shaggy mounts Make moan; mourn d, contrapuntal calling; share Meaning and music with the self-sick need Of moose in her mate-mooding. Yea, jar and shake they, 84 THE BARBARIANS Obsequent, with a trampling, clash of horns On bough, swift thrust and firm, persistent hoof Of him, hills monarch, who with strenuous tread Starts, strains and staggers through thick, ripping stems Mid gorge-gloom d fogs, obscure, moon-sepulchred, Dread-rotting forests and the rock-brow d peaks : Moose, frost s hot despot and most monstrous dream Of those ferocious mountains. He shall pass Tireless pursuing. He shall burn a blood That wars and hurtles as the torrent-rush Of thousand rock-streams. Through impetuous night The nightlong shall he pass nor pause nor swerve ; Pass and keep passing. And the peace of him Shall be by passion s perpetuity. Moose : through the forest an on-rushing rage, Even from beyond north s broad ridge-back, beyond Foreland and moorland and quick, tortuous flood He comes and comes resistless through swart night ; Lust s monstrous, mightiest vision of hills all. Such are the savage visions of rough hills ; Night s wrath, and wonder of primeval world s 85 EARLIER POEMS Grim-hew d, gigantic, sinewy unease ! Day breaks ! Black brooksides and the furry flanks Glisten for gorgeous frostlight. Sleep-lock d horns Of the flinty ridge rouse up and sweep aside The shrunk moon from the western vault. Hill-shapes Rear, rise and shake night s icy, moon-born mists From heavy shoulders rough barbarity. Soughs a breath-blare of breeze ; a quaffing draught Sluices the lake, mid-stirr d, to steely trough, Crest-blaze. (A sun-warn d flock of floating fowl Wing flight with whirr and whiffling.) And men s curse Snarls on the mountains; and men s iron hand Reeks with earth s sap of sacrifice. Wroth world Starts forth to fight ; to prey upon and feed from Itself s own maw exhaustless ; strong, swart world ; Scarr d, gaunt, gigantic, cursed in hoof s unease ; Tremendous, terrible, primeval ; passing Resistless, grand, self-passion d, calm ; ay, pulsing Peace-fill d by blood s ubiquity of wrath ! 86 HIEMATION IT is the first snow. And the scars of earth Are cover d. And oblivion descends Over old agony. And every ill Lies heal d. And winter s well. Snows, marbled to a reach of coiling surf Beneath north walls, froth d combers alabastrine Of crystal-shimmering foam-frost in the sun, Poised in pulsation overpeer the pure, Plough-open d lane like pendulant, frore fringe Stalactic bordering jaws of a bluff-cove Ice-lapp d to stillness ; yet filPd with the sun, Iridescent, sparkled for a plenitude Of fire-potential and the spring to-be. Or, where on marsh crisp tides receding leave Air-hung the sleety, crush d or quaking caves, These with the ray d, prismatic sun shot-through, Invigorate, flush as with a memory yet Of June green and the oat-fields flood gone-by. That lightning d life to-be with life-time lost 87 EARLIER POEMS Blends and is intermingled, lies transfigured In the instant, sun-soak d snow-gleam. Even the blind Shades of sepulchral, drift-tomb d trees bow d down By burden of broad branches, their best dusk Yet bears to overbrimming the brave blue Of wind-wash d, sun-steep d skies above, beyond Spruce-arches and chill-canopied, dark boughs. That shine or shade alike, for crystalline Infusion, catch and care for, make alive In snow-light, the wide life of sun-steep d space ; And are in winter s wealth world-reconciled, Earth-season d to the season of the sun. Here on the meadow-pool a breeze has blown Clean the keen ice ; that winter s world below, Life liquid-lens d beneath the sun-glazed plane, Shows clear, cool, curiously with wavering glooms, Fleck d twilights, flexures of conglobing beams On deep-brown bottom-mould like sheen and dance Of shine on shallow, sun-warm d, weak-waved beaches In summer-time long-gone of wrinkling sands. Lo ! neath the ice small caddice-worms in sheaths 88 HIEMATION Aforth for foraging mid musty weeds ; Trick d yet in greenest cress ; that summer-hued They bide by winter s welfare ; nor alone Live well. For, builded by the pool, quaint mounds Of muskrats reed-stalks, matted leaves, shrunk moss Mass d in old alder-clumps, rough-eaved, with snow Thick-roof d, strong-buttress d ; that the swart musk- rat sleeps Through long, wild nights whose very wildness yields Austerest comfort, grim security To the domed lake-dwelling ; while, below, the lake Holds food, adventure, neath the glaze of stars ! Nor are the fields untenanted of folk Through the snow-season. But the sifted snow Serves for flake-tunnel ; larder large with nuts, Cones, seeds ; intricate labyrinth of lithe, Paw-padded passages or the prick d paths of mice, Four feet close-cluster d in the leap, with tail Light-trailing fine upon the powdery track ; Or lustier lift of squirrel ; the sprawl d spur Of a scrawn d crow scavenging ; with here the sweep Claw-like of broad wing-pens upon the plane EARLIER POEMS Of crystal pasture ; and the partridge low, Long, lazy lunge of stride. It is the first snow. But oblivion Hides scarce the scars of earth. For earth lives on Self-reconciled with scars. For winter s well, Vivid, awake with wonderful, white strength Reveal d, prophetic of a snow-born spring. Who would regret that earth hath scars and aileth All autumn long ; when winter is to heal, Make well the ills of earth ; when else were nought, No winter, nor no nurturing of spring ? Who can regret our mortal ill, when else White sympathy and healing grief s soft snow, When else earth s peace, were meaningless ; when health Of soul and sanity of daylight thought Live but by pain and sin ; when winter, spring Were nought but by old mourning of the mind; When every mourning were by meaning joy ; Autumn, earth-worthy, for the fostering snow ? It is the first snow. And the scars of earth Are cover d. But reveal thereby her soul. 90 UNDER GLASS HERE teems the sacred spark, earth s trust and troth Of the splendor of the sun through the sere season ; Lamp of the labor of the sleeping year. Stout pistils, plumping ovules, quickening-sperm d Pollen ; and parti-color d spurt of plumes, Petals, pale sepals and strong, emerald spread Of leaf -stalks, netted, veinous for sluiced sap In the cells ; and bees with workaday, dim din Transporting, permeating, fructifying ! Color and fragrance ! Honey-hearted cups For the bees to seek and suck of ! These are priests, Torch-bearers, altar-vestals incensing With choir and chalice in the temple here The shrine of the splendor of the sun s own power, The spark of the full-flare summer-flame to-be When worship spreads and springs, not sole within Sun-surfeit of the sacristy but, there Uncloister d out beyond in June s wild world. These are the vestals of the vital spark, Chroniclers, prophets of those protean days EARLIER POEMS When strength was, strength shall be of marriage made Now but in nurture of the nobler few ; Poets, love-devotees of the shrine, souls sure Of the plenitude and permanence of flux Procreant and the patience of sun s power : Who waits world s hour to work his will in the world, Working through these who wonder at delay. Toward the sweet, streaming sunshine the swift sap In myriad cells starts up, swells, splits the husk Of thousand stems, in countless buds exudes ; Breaks forth; and, blossoming, so blends in air With infinite beams through the soft-steam d sunshine. Through the sluiced, swelling fibres myriad beams Impenetrate, impregnate, burst to a bloom The cell-bound sap ; blend and are interblent To mutual permeation and communing, Marriage and meaning in a myriad blooms. Oxalis amber, opening with the shine Of sun on the nigh-translucent petals, leans Lithe, arch d above blown beds of violets swathed In glossiest leaves. Bush d heliotrope beside, Purpled dianthus and the wing d, white pea ; 92 UNDER GLASS Lance-leaved, clean oleander ; gauze-blown grape Make marvellous the smell of air. And all Draw from the dust or damp of loam such scent, Power and pulsation of sap-union with The ardency of sun s down-flaming stream; Each bloom a blending of the bloom of the world, Ember and embryo of sun s procreant strength In June-time when spring so to sap all things. Jonquil and daffodil, cool, bulbous bursts Of the beauty and beaming of the mellow mould ; Primula perch d and Psychic cyclamen, Begonia bunch d in scarlet pendants, velvet, Furr d cineraria : blossoms scant of scent, Yet each a bountiful, bright, prismic-hued Vestment adorning light s self-sacrament Through the dull season, scintillant, sun-soak d To fresh, firm flash of color, quick release Of the dun loam in delight of open gleam. And for hush d honey-smell, for honey-hues Of delicate transparence umber-fused, Yellow-of-lemon, streak d, thrush-throated white, With flush and blush and orience of rose 93 EARLIER POEMS Lo, shrubb d azaleas, flawless spread of bloom Fill d with the bees and redolent of murmur Bland as the anthem of a May ; but border d About with aureoled pea-spikes of the broom And baubles of the spined acacia clung Close in interstices of twilight, thick, Gloss d leaf-thorns ; all, symbols of some rebirth Of earth to-be and patience of the passion Of the frost. And broad along sun-facing walls Peach, toned in tenderness of pink; or flooded, Organ-voiced effluence of the bridal-bloom d Blood-orange, stupefaction, faith-o erpowering Monstrance imperial of the priestly flame s Transfiguration fumed, yet cloistrally VeiPd with the intimate incense tropic-savor d Of insect-apt air-orchids ; or chord re-echoed, Pathetic of atonement-won, from chalice Of lilies in still, paschal glory, gold Offer d for flame-communion sap with sun ! Now is the splendor of the prime of these Which, inflorescent, keep alight earth s lamp 94 UNDER GLASS Through the sere season ; the sweet cycle of dreams Which inly keep complete the sleeping seeds Of annual orbit ; in whose heart the splendor Of ash-worn world is stored to smoulder, sparkle, Spurt up and fling in shower of brands awide A conflagration of all earth, awide Through wood and field and gardenside ; secure To seed, grow great and serve perennial wise The splendor of sun s flowering of earth ; Priests to the permanence of priesthood-lore, Sun-foster d to make proselyte sun s earth. Lo ! seedlings ranged of tissuey green in rows, Slips, scions, novices of cloistral nurture Clipp d from the culture of earth s green gone-by For green June-holiday and festival. Lo ! and, without in the world, wind, big with life Got of the south, transfuses air with savor And sweetness of the steam-exuding loam. Snow swoons and fades from off the fields. A flush Of rose-warm, amber, opaline blush-tints Shimmers through tree-tops with the bloom and burst Of sap through cells and sheaths of the swelling bud. 95 EARLIER POEMS Lo ! is the torch alight ; and world awakes To efflorescence. And the trust and troth, Lamp of the labor of the sun, earth s gospel Of priest and cloister and the culture pluck d Of poet-spirits and sun s choicest souls; The faith of the few in patience of the power Of sun who works his will in will of the world ; The faith of the prophets of re- birth of earth : How strength, which was and shall be, still lives on By permanence of passing; stands fulfill d! THE GARDEN OF THE GULF OVER the wide sea a warm, wild wind sweeping Sweet, swift and mild makes of the foam froth-flowers Quick, mild and moist ; a showery foliature Of soft, salt-scented blossoming, a budding, Blooming and frost-like withering-away White on the swirl of ocean blue in the sun. There are wild clouds shower-laden, sooth and dank Like froth over the blue sky scurrying swept ; Aloft, foam flowering forth from the wide wind Out of its warm, south bosom ; a swift budding, Blooming and withering through the atmosphere Ocean and azure sky alike one garden Of vaporous iridescence, shower and shine For mist sunsaturate, for petals woven Of watery woof by sun s fine fingering : Seasons successive, surge, burst, bloom, collapse ; One multitudinous verdure, momently Full-orbited in elemental year. There are quick hearts and wild in sea s wide garden 97 EARLIER POEMS Leaping like light and wonder of sunbeams From flower to flower foam-crested. These with whirr Of whistling wings and whispering, lithe flight Flash silvery-vivid ; here, there, everywhere One sheen, one hush d incitement of desire For tingling, froth-like life. These dash and drown In honey-hearts of the salt-scented drift Their crystal fire and flame. On crystalline, Cool spume they pasture and the lambent lapse Fluorescent, molten of blown pollen-dust Spray d from the crests of ocean. Such wing d fish Are bees of the garden of the gulf. The clouds Feed, too, their wing d life. For the stream of the sky Gleams with the glint of white plumes, in sunshine Snow-like against the blue, but in the bosom Of the cloud-hearts like bees or butterflies Lost quite for lightning of the chalice. These Call and make voice of the wild wind s delight Tumultuous, flung down from the torn and tossing Petals gale-shaken of the azure vault : THE GARDEN OF THE (SULF " Meanings of waters and wide winds and all Mingled in motion of gulf s guardians, The great gulls angel-wing d. And multitude Of purpled, tremulous shadowings deep down In hyalescence of the quivering seas Show burrowings of slow-throbb d, subaqueous lives, Low mid the matted roots of the wave-blossoms Nurtured in cool and dimness of the deep. And along ocean s weltering rush and roar Frail, wingless, globose, iridescent things Swirl, spread like bubbles bladdery down the flow Of waves and winds, feeding from out the foam With deft, long feelers. And these ever flow And faint not. But perpetual frailty of These whirl d seeds through the sea s sere agitation Makes of their faintness strength and permanence To feed and fill well from the unwithering, Live plash and lapsing of the gulf s great stream ; To pasture, feed full of the great gulf s strength, Of bud and burst and withering of foam-blossoms (Blood-beats perpetual-born of ocean s power Powerless ; one evanescence endlessly) 99 EARLIER POEMS By equilibration of their life-in-death Driven onward : as the great waves lift and fall 100 Ill POEMS PSYCHOLOGICAL THE SWIMMER DROWN I ? Nay, I attain and am with thee Safe from the flood, and young and strong and warn* To love ; who seem d but then so cramp d and old, Cold and with boding as of Styx in me, Chill d for the Hellespontine flux and foam ; Till, lo ! call d I on thee and once again Struck firmly forth and clove to the far shore So swift I felt not effort ! At thy feet Now let me lie and dream a deathless love ! Yea, for we are as gods ! Had I but drown d Dreaming on thee, were Hades hurtless to me ; Only pale immortality of love ; Thine image faint and frail ever before me As, lo ! thou sittest fair and frail and pale ; Now, now, I ween, half-fading so before me Here on the dim shore by the dark-faced flood ! Ay, as thou fadest ! (And I marvel much How thou shouldst fade thus.) Thus the love in me Would bide half-faint as now faint 1, half-loveless, 103 EARLIER POEMS Here before thee ! Ah, losing love, like sense Of thy white image and of dark-faced sea, Dim shore ; yea, losing all : as though I drown d, Not grasp d thee ! Though, in sooth, I scarce could grieve Loss even of life ! Nought now : love, shore nor flood Nor thou Who art thou ? What wert thou ? What shore ? What flood ? Up bubbles all his amorous breath. 104 CARRION A PAIN of the sun, piercing with beak and claw ! A vulture-tearing, back, above in the brain ! Eternal tramping, tramping ! Ceaselessly The forward lift of the foot ; the forward swing ; The forward footfall : but to lift again ! Ever the body forward bent ; ay, bent, I say, by burden of the pack too huge For human, soldierly uprightness : yet The spirit human, still human-erect ; Forward, ceaselessly forward ! Here in the sun I toil, still lifting, swinging, plodding : aye Eternal tramping, tramping ; effort still Immitigable, nigh intolerable, Yet unremittent ; ever energy ! The day wears. There was once a white-hot way Of sands and sands, blistering the soles ; struck up Glittering, ah, insufferably glared Against these eye-balls. That was long ago. There was a stagnant jungle-side, lagoon d 105 EARLIER POEMS And evil-smelling, glistening horridly, Unguently bristling serpentwise with fangs And poison-virulent pestilence. That was Long ago. There were multitude of men My comrades, scuffling up the pungent dust, Tramp, tramp, through mouth and nostrils parchingly : A suffocation. That was long ago. Men dropp d by the way ; were left there where they fell: They could no more endure. (There was a bird Descending on the dead !) I still endure. Now is no road, no jungle-side, no troop Marching ; but this intolerable sun Which tears the vital brain with beak and claw. There was a space, the shivering road uprear d Stark in the face of me. I flung it back, O er-pushing, clambering, plunging with my soles And shoulders till the energy of thrust Levell d the way. Which forthwith rear d anew, Front to face striking me. T was long ago. No road, no front-to-face blockade : but feet Steadily lifting, swinging, falling on 1 06 CARRION Forward ! And only I am here with the sun Which pierces as twould burst into the brain. What piecemeal tearing vulturewise ! What rip And rend of the scalp and cartilage ! I turn ; Ward-off the ray with wrist and arm, defend Face from the onslaught ! Whence this dusk I clutch ? This solid, struggling blackness like a throat ? Choked ? Strangled ? Stretch d in the startling night lie I : Death-grip of mine o the gorge would feast too soon ! 107 THE NOVICE SOUL that this incense stifles ! Suddenly Seem candle, censer, e en the cross we crave, But mummery, a tinsel and display Where ne er were substance. Fling the casement wide ; Let the unpainted moon, the vital air Of alpine altitudes, absolve this cell, Purify vestments of the charnel-smoke And signify a true sublimity Of inward freedom. How these grisly peaks Bear aloft horn d and jutted crags to be A world of fearless godlessness ; a scene Of desolation verily, but grim With irony at any orphanage, With stern rebuke upon us hearts who seek, Bereaved, a god by slavish worldlessness. Yet are we greater than our worldlessness, Greater than such unorphan d, godless world : Who learn our orphanage nor faint from it. Lo ! I will forth into world-orphanage 108 THE NOVICE Of freedom, will be willess slave no more To innocence, mystery and God. I crave To learn aright night and this earnest moon Of alpine effluence ; and be as one Of these crags. Only, in the new resolve, Let me be potent as nor crags nor moon, Knowing world s good and evil, freedom and World s fear of freedom. Let me be alone Knowing my loneliness ; not then, as erst, Lone yet deluded to companionship Of stale chimeras. Hark ! Yon bell, which tolls The servitude ; and then these cringing cliffs Which chilly echo back the master-tone, Quavering the white light ! How the rich tints seem To glow again unto the note that clangs All nature to the sacrifice: obey d Even by these alpine altitudes since men Have pray d and praised these numberless, long years ! Shall dominance be ended? Shall there be No iterance, no sequent voice to call Insanities down to the nightly stint 109 EARLIER POEMS Of labor, weariness and rest in faith That truths are otherwise, that all we know Of beetling precipice and direst blast Are symbol, and the substance not yet shown Nor understood e en of obedience? Pardon lip-blasphemy ! Behold, I turn Dumb from my casement. Let the moon or stars See me, if they in any wise can see, Sink to my knees here of my cell alone, In full and reverent companionship With this dead idol whom my lips and heart Still shall obey. Close but the cold air out ! It chills. I am not fit for that live world Of fatherlessness and yon moon-gleam d snows. I should not know, I cannot dare conceive A self-reliance beyond orphanage ; Day s light that needs no lamp ; a freedom aye Responsible through every concrete act. Let there seem emptiness beyond this pale. Be there but incense ; God : and me, His slave ! no THE VIOLINIST SO-FASHION, son ! Sweep the stroke smooth and suave As folks approve ; not with such downright strength Of splendid earnestness ! T were dubb d grotesque ! Oh, but t is genius, power beyond your sphere ! We learn to bow well, learn to fret the string Quite at the common and established nodes, Fit for performance tickling eye and ear Of the dilettanti, for attenuating Some truth authoritative set before us Just to be reinterpreted to them (The blind and deaf to need such minist ring), Not re-created. Far less, lift we up Feeling and fancy (might I call it soul ?) For self -creation ! So, so-fashion, son ! Play the piece deftly by the establish d mode, Press to the pale perfection, seek technique But no creation ! Son, forget the soul ! Ah, could but men be more musicianly ; Hear once the fiddling, not a thousand times in EARLIER POEMS Thus re-demand it ; ah ! ignore all else In rapture of the unrepeating score Soul-comprehended, free from sense at last By understanding of the visual sign Through one performance pedagogy learn d Forever, as we learn sans any sound To read and be at benefit by book By breve and semi-breve, by staff and point Set silent here, yet eloquent beyond Any distress of horse-hair, gut and board ; Free from mere sense ; free even to surpass Yon score authoritative ; yea, to create Fresh music, inwardly indifferent how The master made the old tune ; tuning yet A phrase which savors of the master-make By very virtue of original Audacity ! Ay, thus have I, my son, In the strong spirit of hours as keen as yours Years gone, betook me to the garret (great With enterprise was it the genuine, High genius ?) where alone, unheard my bow Fell noiseless, nor would fingers ache and smart 112 THE VIOLINIST Nor eye grow blurry with the plaguing page ; But music entering silently fill all Reaches and confines of an universe Young once and dreaming of an art at birth And radiant ; which aye is for the few God -gifted ; nay, which is not yet, my son. Ah, but the rapture and the dreaming made An agony of every torturing rote So keen, so piercing, that I earn my salt, Reputed skilful at my trade, a craftsman Well-paid and well-applauded. Yea, my son, Ours is not greatness, high musicianship Of self-dependence openly unique ; But minist ring which shall be greatly meant! Dream generous dreams, be genius, genuine As may be ; nor forget the soul ! But let The agony of soul-relinquish d (lost Incessantly and irremediably), Shot-through the quivering tones, teach unaware This throng an hint of splendor earth shall learn In other times by other strengths. Be yours The splendor even in forswearing it ! 113 EARLIER POEMS Work, be unhappy , but believe ! Even so, So-fashion suavely sweep the bow ; achieve A recognised interpreting : but let Earnestness twinge you to the finger-tips, Music be misery : that your tragedy Be power ! Let soul but rend you, rote by rote ! 114 ONE WAY OF GRIEF KIND sir, I am a strong, stout-working man, Bold to bear sorrow may such sorrow fall As mine on you nor yours ! You see, I stand Shaken, unstrung ; even though your sure support Steadies me somewhat. Whence you found me stretch d Here on the stiff, stark ground I thank you, sir I could not, though I tried till dawn, have raised Body of mine but for your lifting hand. For sorrow, sleeplessness and least of food Weaken the well and strong till they like me Weep as a child. We buried her, my child, Today. And the week s work is done. I came Forth in this chill and comfortless night-air Under these strange, far stars and heartless moon Here by the still trees for the comfort, sir ; Their calm, so to be friends with and grow calm Out of my cottage. For, within, no stool, No patch of carpet but cries out her curls, Her lips and angel-laugh too clear and cured Of earth for captive in my cottage. Sir, EARLIER POEMS How came God grant a gift too good to keep ? No bit of homeliness and everyday Where she sat, play d her plays or croon d her tunes, Snatches of song her own ; where she with broom Of fit, small size swept, dusted ever after The clean-swept footsteps of her mother ! Oh, She had been sweeping in the passage (just Five days ago, twas Monday), proud and full Of busiest house-work, whilst I sat nor saw My morning s-news but casually made sport, Joked at her six-year zeal as fathers use, Her tireless will to work for work s sole sake (No need of any end or aim for work, Loved ones to work for, which we fathers need) : "You 11 scarce work life-time long with such a will, Eh, child ? " But she : " Father ! " she ran and wept Wailingly : "Father, what so hurts my head ? " Then, she to bed in stupor ; nor awaked Save in delirium, sir ; nor knew me more. The mother ? Stricken from the first ; but breathes, Lives, lies within tis of the child I speak. Sir, you will say she s better-off, now dead, 116 ONE WAY OF GRIEF Than ever I could make her surely, sir If saved such sorrow s possibility And loss of all to work for ! Sir, she was Our only child. I used to read her tales Of elves and goblins, talking trees my rearing Brought me to knowledge of old-country lore And woodland fairy-facts. She d sit and hear, Say nothing ; yet a seven-night thence she d sing The whole tale word for word from first to end Straight out of memory to a wonder-tune ! Every man, every woman loved my child. I, sir, alone of men, my wife alone Of women knew what, every morn, it meant To wake at half-dream d laughter, some soft whisper Whirring about our room on wings from out Her crib beside the bed ; safely to stretch A hand and feel her two fists fasten mine To cheek and sleep thus, that I might not move. Sir, there s no tale nor fairy-song now five Long nights, nor morning-whisper nor love-laugh In the cottage. No, nor sleep for me nor mine ; Nor shall be sleep till we sleep with our child ! 117 EARLIER POEMS Sir, I detain you ; thank you, sir ! There s wood To fetch in yet for the night my wife needs care. Ah yes, I ve ample work to do my wife Should die of this ; and meanwhile she wants care. Sir, I ll be strong again and tend my wife ; Fetch in the wood. But, sir, save for my wife I ve nothing. When she dies of this, I 11 be But more unmann d ; only more like to bide Here as you found me prone without on the ground, 118 THE HERMIT AY, t is a desolate twilight. The dull rain Drops large in isolated clots upon The soggy leaf-floor. And the leaves o er-head Shut out all sky save momently a cloud Caught in the pine -tops, choked and sobbing there. Ay, tis a dismal time. Yet just a thrush, Huddled and sogg d as any old, brown leaf, Makes music. And I, crouch d below in the dusk, Clasp close this rough trunk, hush d as any tree And moveless save for drip and serious splash Of the constant rain on brow and breast ; am here (Until your coming, brisk, in comradeship !) Alone with fog and forest and this thrush. Loud, sir : the song has ceased ! I care not now What wild thing else we startle, scare to wing Or covert; but will sludge along with you Supperward, head bow d, feet at stalwart crunch And rotty crackle over quick and dead Of the wood-floor. What care I ? You are no thrush ! 119 EARLIER POEMS Nay, friend ; you sure are more than any thrush Yet somewhat weak at woodcraft say, too strong In sundry human sympathies to heed The tragedy of thus unsympathizing : As I feel tragedy in being a man Here and alone with thrush, twilight and storm. You prefer friends intelligible, shun Contact of creatures whose society Is no society in sort humane ? You prefer interchange of word and look Couch d in communicant convention, scarce This isolation which we woodsmen know? Slowly ! And plod not on that herb ! Take heed First of the primitive companionship We find of the forest, very like indeed To human sociability, with certain Spice of an unsophistication, plain Expression of opinion, even if less Elaborate in the communal interchange ! Though first I will admit he sings again, Hark ! in the far depths (nay, I stick with you!) 120 THE HERMIT There s nothing in the forest that s not found In measure richlier, wiselier, maybe, In civilization ; I am no forsworn, Unforlorn hermit falsely hermit-like; Yet feel the fortune of yon hermit-bird : Feeling the counter-implication how Nor isolation nor companionship Be predicate of forest-lore alone Nor sole of man s society : but both Are shared. There s interchange of word and look Scarce less complete in forest-lore than man s Society, if but our estimate Of satisfactory conference in each Be based in ratio to the tragic rift Respectively, take for criterion The isolation which we woodsmen know, In this our woodcraft, from these forest-things No more intensely nor preponderantly Than human failures at a fellowship ! Maybe, t is the pettiness in this our rift Of the woods which forces on us to the marrow The civilization-tragedy : if more 121 EARLIER POEMS Society in humans, then the worse The inevitably incompatible Failure to comprehend, be mutual In men s assemblages for me, for you. Tomorrow, haply, may I revel in The splendor, as the tragedy : not now ! Friend, gripe mine arm ! There s somewhat in this dusk That sets me staggering, that craves a crutch ! Thanks, thanks ! you are stiff of foot to straighten me And act my staff ? Someway the loneliness Of noblest wood-communion but makes more Frightful-intense the apperception of Our human loneliness, our fuller commune We flaunt so glibly. Yonder is the camp ? That flare means man s civility ? Chaff loud ; Laugh-off the supper and the bedward time With forced free-fellowship : for fear I 11 dream A thrush sings through the hermitage of men ! 122 AN ORNITHOLOGIST WHAT overbillowing of a melody mad ? < What untamed music ? Oh, their very names Mean each such twittering outburst rapturous Of strange, abrupt, ingenuous euphony ! Lark, oriole, bobolink : to title them Is song. Yet surely not for sheer bird-song Haste you and hearken oft in the fields at dawn ? Patience, a moment (yes, the tune of the thrush) ! I m ruffled a bit, maybe, and must a little Out-talk the art you d scarce appreciate ; Who come to me for guide expert toward A half-sung trend of tones, unfmish of notes You sneer a slur to, ere depart with dream More or less disillusionized : man s music Shown more sophisticated (cat-bird ; robin Mark both!) so better satisfying ! Friend, I see a fall of the face in you, not all Due to my voluble impertinence But some to the songs (an oven-bird : loud, loud !) You hear, perhaps, for the first time. Your own voice - 123 EARLIER POEMS I like it well would satisfy you more. Not that 1 deem you ever would deny (Yon crow caws meaningly) a musical Value in least to this wild symphony You d fain stop ears at, while below my breath Thus to make sure you miss no worst of us 1 garrulously (the oriole repeats !) Extemporize. These ritornelles, roulades (Nay, listen the bubbling goldfinch !) liquidly Lifted aquiver in tremulous air, were worth Elaboration or analysis With much among the lyric-laughs of men ? And yet (that yellowhammer tis that squeals) Not musically satisfying, should Music be measured by mere complexity, A less and more sheerly, of bird s to man s! To me, forsooth, there seems an interest Nerve-occupying as with an increment Of complication though the practice wants Comparatively in variety Of juxtapositions possible betwixt The variables, so is per se simplex 124 AN ORNITHOLOGIST In the junction, human practice is not chain d-to, Of timbre-change each with a pitch-change, sith the bird No two alike, maybe ; yet all, in sort Alters the tang too with each rise or fall Of the scale t is quaint, t is taking ! Yet indeed I blame you not; I, rather, were the first (Appreciating Brahms, Dvorak or Grieg In terms above those trailing geese at squawk High in the blue, north -streaming over the sun!) To forswear scarce-articulate ecstacies It pricks me at the heart to spoil them, though ! Fit for the forests, haply, but for man Childish as chuckle of that chickadee : Not but that there s some manhood in a child ! Yet, hark ! a song-sparrow ; of all souls of spring The very quick quintessence ! Feel you, sir, No soul in music, an overunity Ne er-so complex d ; no personal infinite Or man s or bird s equally live and free ? A self still self-express d even as mine Tormenting yours a truth, nor more nor less 125 EARLIER POEMS But absolute-like each personal containment, Or bird s or man s ; if only made mine-own ? A self, though less by the bird elaborate In cosmic-couch d projection, just thereby Serving comparison for base, for a mordant Of Wagner s tones as subtler than yon jay s : A self conspicuous, if by dint of foiling The piteous bird-inadequacy more, In bird as man ! And, though you hear for same Within the type of the species many songs Enough unlike to him who hearkens them, Yet how diverse these species which approve The world-soul ! With what utmost piquancy As not in men whose much similitude Of caution and conservatism cultured Leads ear to expect the soul-identity ! Of pure self -utterance mid these radiant dews And mildmist-manners of the sun salutant Here o er the low ground, with all upper air At tremble, vibrant : world-enthusiasm Of a birdness ! (Hush ! My bobolink again ! ) 126 AN ASTRONOMER I LIFT mine eyes unto the stars whence cometh Help to the judgment of an universe, Unto the stars; and find their piercing sight So crisp, so shimmering-keen of this night-frost ! My light as theirs : and mine the estimate. Long have I known and taught that what we call Copernican of divers vortices And various orbits quite doth supersede The Ptolemaic of the vaulted spheres Arch d over earth for fulcrum ; long have taught, Yet never till this solitary hour Guess d the true contrast nor conceived the law That regulates and reconciles both schemes Of Ptolemy as of Copernicus To one soul-systeming. The hour this calm, Crystalline, steel-clamp d, deep, mid-winter night ; The place and occupation this untamed, Invigorating wilderness wherein I tread untrodden paths and track the world As the first maker though the way be worn ; 127 EARLIER POEMS The hour, the place and occupation all Conduce to clarification ; where this light Of star on snow-crust yields me estimate Of crust or star. I centre here alone Earth and the sundry spheres alike, by feeling Intensely so these vortices of sight ; Am Ptolemaic or Copernican By rich admission of the counter-scheme Appropriately. Hitherto I clave To the one, condemn d the other. Now I cherish Both equally ; who first have found right place For either. Is it, I have but just become Under the inspiration of this frost And star-shine such philosopher, as erst I would not be ; transcending, after years, The unsoul d star-science ; by heart-estimating Star-shine, establishing truth s over-fact ? How long I had taught, old Ptolemy were crude, First-felt confusion ; and Copernicus (Or call it Kepler, who may heed the name ?) A realization and interpreting Of the fact in absolute fact-evidence, 128 AN ASTRONOMER Sense-proven logic ! Such in sooth they are, I allow it yet, if sheerly outward fact Be all the evidence ; nor the estimate, Judgment itself, the sense to feel the fact, Be equal evidence ! How deep I had felt The dignity and grandeur of the change From the old-supposed, self-centralizing man, False pivot of the sun and stars and skies, To the mere man-item ! Now and suddenly I avow this very dignity for warrant Of proper pride, a self-respect achieved Beyond fact-deprecation ; pride wherethrough Alone this universe of self-neglect Can take its ground. In faith, the change were then A dignity and grandeur past compare (An overmanhood yet within the man) If thus interpreted ; though otherwise True, only were the spirit measured quite By lore too crude to comprehend the least Self-continence of mutual nebulas ! If ancient Ptolemy (Hipparchus heir, Eudoxus scholar) did but mistranslate 129 EARLIER POEMS Philosophy to fields mechanical, By the confusion undemark d subverting Both disciplines to error; none the less Did this Copernicus construct a scheme Of crude mechanics which we sycophants Have half-mistook for full philosophy. On, then, from both. And sith these stars and moons Are utterly indifferent to my mass Save as I am of these a particle Thrusting infmitesimally (yet The more by virtue of such partnership And insignificance, significant As centre-pivot, focus, fulcrum of All facts experienced), so even each least Crystal and ray-diffusing molecule Of star-stuff estimates, conglomerately Systematizes in the mutualism Of apprehension inly registrate, An universe each of the farthest spheres And some self-focus. Thus I lift mine eyes Unto the stars whence ever cometh help. 130 THE DIVORCED THEY say that you despised me, cheated me, Wrong d me, a wife forsaken and forlorn. I doubt not one sad word of all they say. Whence, sith the souls of many among men Were shock d beyond composure should I yield To crime condonable and pardon you ; Whence, for the precedent of public shame, I brought a cause against you, made my plea, Proved the avow d and obvious wrong ; so stand Clear d of complicity; redress d : divorced ! Thus much for sop to custom ; in cold eyes Convention d with the vision of the courts I hold me reinstated, rectified. Such for their world of righteous wrath ! For you ? How might I judge you ? I, who, in default Of infinite intuition, fail d response Where marriage most were inward unioning ? Who lack d of filling up that life of love Spiritual, inmost, your life needed most EARLIER POEMS Where least I rose to rendering it : your want Passionate, intellectual, ah ! god-like, For commune ultimate, your soul with mine, In beauty of a deep-dream d philosophy ? How I aspired to meet you, yearn with you, In you and through you unto those sky-depths, Forsooth, forever hidden from my ken ! How I aspired ! Yet could but half-discern Chill-chisell d speculation, outlines cold Of marbled ideality ; not feel Your quick, organic cosmos, realize Self-consciousness alive, complete, impassion d, Art-whole in worldship. Oh : how I fell short ! - Friends (I have made such moan to) have rejoin d " Yours the domestic, concrete, vivid love Of home and hearth and womanhood humane, The real, the Christian, the complete. His vague, Abstract, dim, universalistic boast Of pagan self-dependence leads, we know And you know be it your consoling! leads By its own mystic emptiness to just Such isolation, aberration, crime ! 132 THE DIVORCED Comfort yourself that yours is not the crime ! " Friends, I have made my moan to, thus reply With well-meant mockery. My crime tis to fail Response where your love led me nobliest. Yours was the limitless capacity, I ween, for leading, drawing up and on (Ah, could I have made the potence practical !) Of hearth and home and womanhood humane To humane inspiration, love complete, Concrete, compassion d most by widening out, Deepening down, transfusing commonplace Sentiment with a world-morality : Christ s meaning in the marriage of two souls. And I could not be led, nor make to mount Your wise way and the breathlessness was mine ! Nor, that your faithlessness in falling short Of such philosophy s full working shows (However vile the fall, still equal-vile In the sight of each as your confession proves) A flaw in the lute, a passion gone astray Unfunction d yet in personality (Conscience organic of a moralism) 133 EARLIER POEMS Tis little ! Tis but point within your plea, Incomprehensible to both of us, Of our miscomprehensions ; yields no rod To wrathlessness ; nor any right to judge you. I, whose own weakness wears the front of yours, By falling short of absolute matrimony (My failure s depth proven in your depth of fall) Forced your philosophy to fail like vice ! Dear, I rise now to heights intuitive Too late of intimate philosophy Unguess d before ; feel passionate consciousness Of our soul-unity when parted most ! I have indeed contested suit to prove Precedents in a world unready yet To forego righteous wrath ; whose righteous wrath Were wrong d by less insistence. Though, for you. The fault is felt mine from the first. And loss Of opportunity to rectify By reparation is my cross to bear. Cross ? T is soul-fate, self-fate unto us two ; Not punishment sprung of the cold, dead law ! 134 THE DIVORCED Quick fate stands immanent already ; lives Through inmost overcoming in my love ! But for our two sad life-times sinn d away ! 35 A CANDIDATE FOR COMMITTAL AM I the man who thinks too much, whom dreams Have driven now to uttermost disgrace, Save for this kind certificate you 11 sign Soon as the skill d examination s done ? Certainly this is I ; as you are he I used to know so well in student-days ; We two whose works diversified so wide Only to bring us face to face at last Here, and as now ! Old friend, I grasp your hand ! Strange, I am cheerful, strong and quite sane now At sight of your keen, psychologic smile Working me wonders. Sure, a strange mischance To come quite sane of a sudden ; when they say T is but mine obvious insanity Saves me from ball and chain and bitter bread ! And you, the testimonial expert Of mine insanity, who turn me sane ! Nay, do not interrupt me while I talk ! Let not your friendship fear to find me sane, 136 A CANDIDATE FOR COMMITTAL Friend ! For what can I care ? Such plea of mine Was nothing of my making. I rejoice, Now for the first time, that you scientists Know no compassion. (We philosophers Are all compassion to the fingers ends !) Mine were the crimes, I grant, of overgreat Compassion ; charitable largess of Wealth not mine own ; misuse of misers names To play the god with ! Why excuse my crimes ? I claim no least exemption. I am sane. Let us but feel friends -confidence once more Despite the dismal years of difference And wordy warfare : science on your side ; Philosophy on mine who sought to prove No gulf irreconcilable between us ; Only a partial, preassumed, abstract Finitude for the flaw of your idea, Resolved and overcome and reconciled Even in the concrete unioning of mine, My principle of infinite, functional Godship determining a self-universe ! T is ne er philosophy that drives one mad ; 137 EARLIER POEMS T is falling short from full belief in it To transcend contradiction, reconcile World-lonely love beyond world-agony, Include insanity and make it sane. I was not firm philosopher enough To find divinity through worst of dearth ; I was not strong to bear the vast idea Alone, unaided of your friendliness. Then too the combat and the bitter words ; A world for arbiter betwixt us twain, Station d between to separate; when heart And brain as one that friendship felt for you, One with the fresh philosophy I loved Cried out how we were reconciled from first Could you but feel for me, but of me learn ! That was the agony : to combat so When combat turn d both truths into a lie ! You d rest in fmitude for final fact, Accept self-isolation undismay d ; Soar not to loneliness, love s infinite Conscience of isolation ? Friend, my soul Needs reconcile its loneliness or cease ! A CANDIDATE FOR COMMITTAL Now t is but cure for such-like suffering, My terrible loneliness of brain and blood, To feel again your presence, know your gaze : That gaze which burn d-through every page you wrote ; Explain as now, mind-intimate at last, Finally friend in friend ! I go to face Judge, jury, all the court-room wide agape To hush huge laughter at the mumbling, marr d Old man of many marvellous lunacies ; Face them nor fear them, fill d to a firmness now With health and sanity of thought once more (Love s outlook of a mutuality) ; To front and bear the brunt of what may come, Disgrace if needs be, misery welcome now With such a consciousness of you beyond ! Only your smile is wearing threadbare, friend. Have scientists compassion after all ? Only : be sure you stand not far from me There in the court ; that I may touch your hand, Feel friends -blood tingle, see your face in the flesh, Lest I go mad once more and scare them there. 139 EARLIER POEMS Forsooth, I am an old and lonely man, Worn-out with too much thinking ; and my dreams Crowd on me once again. You 11 come with me Now into court and sit beside me there While I show judge and them how sane I am, Braced by the bearing of a man like you ! Truly, a fondly-featured meeting, friend, That brings disgrace in the end on one like me, Disgrace of too great sudden sanity For a soul worn-out with wrangling. Do we come ? The examination s over ? Though I ve told Not one word yet of how, when I was mad With loneliness but that is gone-by now How world-compassion but I weep, it seems ! Come, friend ! That paper in your hand, I trust, Holds all I ve told you ? Your psychology Will profit much by just my case in point Of how a frail philosopher went mad For loneliness of too strange thinking ; fell Sane again of a sudden Ha ! not leave Me here alone with these who hold me here ! 140 A CANDIDATE FOR COMMITTAL Never alone, friend ! I Ml be with you still ! Ha ! he is gone ? And I m not there to tell The court how sane I am ? Men : am I mad ? 141 THE CONVALESCENT LO ! t is the earliest glimmering of dawn ! I wake ; and grow, even with the growing day. The names of flowers told unceasingly In fragrant, fresh reiterance ; the green, Cool and delicious energies of earth One by one conjured up and one by one Brooded, made vivid and adored. Nay, first Ere these, the names of all earth s atmosphere s Mighty emotions ; thunders, clouds, the winds Out of the east, north, west and south ; all aspects Of sun and storm, earth s weathering. The mountains And ocean-depths, earth s multiplicities Are told. And with the telling, tone by tone, Comes health back ; finds the soul a sympathy Of insight and a strengthening by strength Of the primal health and lustihood of earth. Ay, and as strength in the contemplating Springs gradual, grows a sympathy again For reptile, bird and brute in heartiness 142 THE CONVALESCENT Each living out the loftier life than earth s, Grasp d by the soul at each ascent, each pulse Of the life-renascence. And to childhood last Its innocent, fair, fresh humanity Grows the expanding insight ; and I dream Of all ingenuous childnesses, all young, Whole-hearted, white expectancies. And shall Doubtless anew learn sympathy with men And women, learn responsibility Now long precluded ? Softly : t is not yet. I have been shut from mixture with my world. I have been very low twixt life and death. I learn life slowly ; must learn thoroughly The lowlier and the lost ere, once again, Maturity and whole humanity Achieved at last as never felt before ! For a fine fancy fills me how such lost And lowlier life-aspects teach and show, In manner to the need most suitable, The loftier energy : how life and health Now learn to absorb, evalue for the first time A wealth, a richness hitherto ignored ; EARLIER POEMS Transcend indeed by vividly realizing Each item long since relegate, nigh-scorn d, Out of life : life then emptiest, lacking quite Childness and animal insistency, Plant-passion, ambience of atmosphere. Thus, for the nonce while here ensconced I lie Mid glimmering walls, to learn and never lose Health s wild-world richness; nor let slip the chanc (Ere health s responsibilities obscure) To broaden out with daylight s pyramid Earth-based, not apex-balanced. Sooth, the plant Seems explicable (to this twilight mood At least of half -health) but by lust of earth And lift of atmosphere, by sun and rain ; A focusship and spherehood known and felt Best in the primal postulate of loam. Sure, and the sun and storm, the lust and lift Were known and comprehended mainly by Some lowlier, weaklier lust and lift supposed, Assumed subservient ; geogonic births Themselves unmediable, taken on trust ! 144 THE CONVALESCENT Yes, and what symbol of an atmosphere, Of element-emotion, each the least Or greatest of soul s vegetations ! Lo ! Naked, up-piercing shafts that mean the sun Mid thicket-strugglers ; or the verdure-clothed, Squat staff which, basking unimpeded, means The sun too : each, a consciousness of need For sunshine in a various phase and place. And rain ? Intended by each succulent cell Of close-oozed tissue ; whether netted wide Twixt strong, rib-trussing veins, else laid along Bladewise ; sluice-succulent through every shape, Sensible, sympathied of sun and rain ; Mingling and melting updrawn energies Of loam with immanence of atmosphere A vegetative physiology Indeed by adaptation, unioning Of elemental chemistries so known, So felt and so made flesh of the flesh of me, Parcel, participation in mine health, Basal of pyramid as ne er before By convalescence, growth in health along 145 EARLIER POEMS With earth s less-growths; from stage to stage, mine earth ! And for the intermediate animal, The self-adaptive not alone to sun And rain, to loam and atmosphere, but yet To vegetation-immanence as well, To growth of the succulent stem and spreading branch Transcended as by an internality More mark d, an elemental structure less Unmediate an inherence none the less Still elemental as still vegetative ; The animal-intense so understood By synthesis of element-through-plant, Of plant-through-element inversively : Made animate by the reconciling. Thus My health grows, shall be builded bit by bit Of the intermediate richness, tier by tier Crowning the undergrowth and proven mine But by the structural basing solidly, The convalescence with the untamed-intense So gain d and grasp d for explanation of The old, lost childnesses of childness reach d 146 THE CONVALESCENT By reapproach, by growth up from beneath Gradual, so appreciative, real. Yes, at a stroke, one fire of fever, fell The towering of mine emptiness, my spirit Struck down beneath even those earth-elements Unseen before for substantive, essential To any soul, true union through a world ! Struck down if for this saving benefit Of gradual recuperation now An element, now planthood, now crude brute; And now, contemplative, the undismay d Expectancy of childness, richliest fill d Just by the convalescence ; stoutliest based In the learning (point by point of soul s past peril) Of the deathward-tottering in vacancy ; A tottering now impossible for nerves Tension d and strenuous, no doubt, yet whole By conscious earth-inclusion, by the feel Of less-things reconciled, vicariously Aye to be cared for. Shall the workless child, Contemplative, the mere analysis 147 EARLIER POEMS Or synthesis, the science sheerly, stay My soul from full recuperation, strong In ripe capitulating, strength by strength, Of man s own world-responsibilities ? No ; no. The apex of the pile o er-peers, Caps and concludes the geometric mass Of all ; is by its height not peak alone But pyramid made perfect in the peak, Made pyramid of tier and tier best by The consummation, most self-realizing By ultimate angulation of the height For height s sake, therefore for the pile beneath, Were element but nebulosity ? Were plant but heterogeneities Of sun and rain, of loam and atmosphere Or any sum, agglomerance of these ? Were the live beast a mere collective coil Of vegetative functions cellularly Carcass-like, irrespective of the brute-zeal Different in kind, in quality from plant As plant from loam distinction absolute, If but by the relativity involved ? 148 THE CONVALESCENT Were child quite explicable (nay, defined In truth), were I, this sicklihood, made plain To health, as some amalgamative group (Whence, then, the novelty, the need for proof ?) Of animal physiologies ? Were man Of world-responsibility but childness With childness iterated till mere stress Of multiple childnesses exhaust his soul ? And though child, brute, plant, earth were each in sort Responsible, total ; yet for the full man (As for the child, brute, plant toward less-things each) Remains the child s, brute s, plant s inadequacy A problem by their difference in kind. No synthesis of merely elements Were plant, no synthesis of brutes were child ; Nor shall mere synthesis of childhoods grow (Mere duplications of this flaccid pulse) My manhood and responsibility, My self-initiative, vital blood ! The synthesis is more than synthesis, An integration over and beyond ; A qualification : as analysis 149 EARLIER POEMS Deintegrates, annihilates beside. No sentience solely, but an actual zeal, Passion of overunion, consciousness Of mutual meaning in the childness now Of contemplation ! And my soul at last Shall realize, appreciate best by Synthetic cosmos-creativities This patient mediation ; working best In and through past and lost, planthood and child By being best actively the strenuous man Of analytic-sympathy, none less High self-assertion, self-transforming all ! Though for the nonce (because breath flutteringly Warns moderation and the lean hands clutch Nerveless the light, and sudden sinkings qualm The flush d frame) first learn patiently the lesser And lowlier, lay the tier-on-tier whereby Alone were apex, apex ; health, I ween, World-worthy ! Be the name of element, Of wind, sun, rain and atmosphere, the title Of planthoods told unceasingly ; that strength 150 THE CONVALESCENT (Slowlier than morning on my four wan walls) Grow gradual, strength by strength, up through ; ab sorb, Resolve by sympathy a nascent soul ! Wherefore anew the brooding ; vividly The adoration convalescentwise. THE BLOCKADER SHADOWS of sea-birds circling ; swift-swept clouds Whitely sun-steep d ; flash of the showering wave Aquiver and wonderful for emerald depth ; Swish of the spray, soft, ice-like, keen as steel ; And over all, through all, the streaming, strong, Salt wind, broad-blowing, vigorous with light, Warm with the warmth of ocean, sun and sky, Day after day out of the east and o er And on and never ceasing. And the ship, Sole sentinel upon the weltering sea, Heaving and settling, slow, majestical To lift and fall of each next, ponderous surge Surges o er-beetling, concaved ; one and one Upbrimming huge beneath us, till compress d, Tense-smooth d with foam thwart-lapsing to the trough, Passes the power and onward, aft and aft, One beyond one relapses distantly Convex, elastic, liquid-turbulent, Aleap for riddance of the weighty bulk, Westward adown the gulf. And day by day 152 THE BLOCKADER Sun, from the east burning above us, orbs Archwise to westward ; while, between, the clouds Swing hurrying shadows. Night by night the stars Multiple, or the heaven-hung, mild moon Through phase and phase, ever from east to west Lift, tower and fall again : beneath, above, One weltering and one processioning Unendingly. And, amidst all, the ship Sentinel, steadily lifting, falling ; swamp d In the trough, upthrust to the crown; wash d, deluged, drown d To rear again with bows a cataract Of torrent riddance, spume arinse in spouts From scuppers, hawse-pipes ; daylong blister d, burn d By fire above ; nightlong beneath the bland Star-sparks assuaged or emberlike by moon In soothness saturated aye the same : By pride-perversity unyieldingly, A sentinel at stand in the shallow seas ! And I too, sentinel on steaming decks, Stand spray d and spumed upon ; burn d black, or blanch d 153 EARLIER POEMS In splendor of the night ; blown warm or chill ; Shadow d by cloud ; bescream d by the swirling gull, Circled by laboring pelican, by flock Of swift shearwaters ; whisper d by the swish Of the foam, by whistling of the silvery flash CalPd fish : stand I at solemn lift and fall By pride-perversity unyieldingly Ceaseless awatch over the shallow seas. And by much watching, much contemplating Of sun and sea and sky, with respite from Conflict at quarters to keep brawn and brain Keen for destruction and the cursed assault, Widens the soul, to heed this stream of the wind, Sense wash of the wave and orbit of the sky ; Take permeation by sun, air and sea Their onwardness ; and onwardness with theirs ; Take disavowal of persistent stand And pride-perversity unyieldingly : Impatient, as with sea and sky and air, Petulant of impertinent blockade. I am mid-aged ; the liberality, 154 THE BLOCKADER Launch d late. From earliest youth conservatism Of obsolete, stiff-bluff d barbarity Call d bravery and martially esteem d, Has been mine ; in oblivion of the blood s Insistent pulse, has cold obedience To worn, old ways of masterful, hard men Been mine train d strait in tactics of the schools To do out duty, whosesoe er the soul (Though haply pinch d and sordid, mean and cramp d, Yet ranking by commission beyond mine) Assumes superiority for source Of absolution as for dominance. I d be too strict, too much this ship s machine, Too sage, perhaps, with awe traditional Tempering the heart, blood-reverence for law, Authority and hierarchy here For recusance : so by the base default From oath, from loyalty of personal pledge, To bring disgrace, their yard-arm disrepute On the young emancipation ! Yet the new Intelligence absolves from ordinance Of any aged, sea worthless shrift this soul 155 EARLIER POEMS Staunch to weigh well the due of years to-come Toward adequate self-consistency. I stand Officer of the deck, drill -martinet Of the schools, train d product of the rule precise Unflinching and immitigable : man Made sheer machine (an the code s imperative Suffice to blot, obliterate a soul ? ) ; Sentinel of a system, genus-type And sign of mundane pride-perversity; And must stand till some chance, spent shot dis-jar The pinion, stanchion, whatnot which I am, To rust and rest in the deep while clanks and thumps A sound steel in the socket ; and the ship Still throbs a bloodless, sense-obliterate, Dull grinding as the system still must front World s onwardness, keep bows (meant to push o er, Swift with the wind and wave ! ) breast-on to the surge. But, for the instant need, be soul s relief, Respite in freedom of conceived revolt ! I am aware this figure of my speech Is insufficient, pitifully prone To misconstruction if the adequate whole 156 THE BLOCKADER Be based on such projection. Heaven and earth In any onwardness which is their own (Our physics teaches) are at worst a loss, At best a nigh-reiterant energy, If progressive, ay, even as regressive, Less adequately than man s mood demands Or man exhibits ; civilization s swing And sweep by far outstripping sun or sky, Salt wind or ocean in their stale intent Ail-too primordial, effete far worse Than any slavishness of humankind : Molecules, whose world-adequacy mark d Archaic eons of cosmogeny; Which, since first, palaeozoic protoplasm, Have slunk ashamed (I credit them with shame Too generously ? ) save as evolving fresh In each fresh, plasmic cell-stuff not themselves. Yet is there somewhat splendid to the sense In sweep of the sphere twixt sea s horizon-round And sea s horizon-round, procession d swarm Sufficient for man s metaphor to fuse Mine with the life which, ne er so slave, at soul 157 EARLIER POEMS Still liberally moves and onwardly (If poised in orbit, yet criterial thus) As such may, marvellously moulds each old In new ascendency unwearyingly Petulant of impertinent blockade. And man, who knowing onwardness yet waits Wanton in sloth, is by the conscienced shame Thus much the less akin to sky and sea. Wherefore in sight of sky and sea I stand For obsolescence and a worn-out way ; For abnegator, unresponsible, Absolved from conscience ; and yet none the less Knowing the lordlier conquering that comes By soul-inclusion and the lifting-on, Not by the crushing-back. This wide insight, This permeation through sun, sea and sky, Lifts it not these in me by metaphor To mighty onwardness inspiring all, Beyond mere molecules redundant drift Of stale, primordial, atomic dearth ? Stand I not here and now (a mere machine, A martinet degenerate by test THE BLOCKADER Of modern liberation) yet by strength Of confluence a soul, a spirit anew, A liberation of an universe ? I free my soul-speech even from the cant Of watch-word, technic of the dismal drill, Cult of authority that, absolute But by inconsequence and ignorance, Now melts from mind as yonder drench of spume, Sea s obsolete, old inefficiency (Which served, maybe, to heed me of my soul) Drips from the breast of the ship I fain would shake Aloft for men to marvel at, a new Signal of self-responsibility Ensign of absolute deliverance ! Yon admiral should startle from his sleep Of savage dreams ; and in the desperate, Sublime refusal sense this soul at last Of the world and world s repugnance of command Not based on a world-whole conscience: and man s best! Man s best! Can mutiny be meant by that? 159 EARLIER POEMS Can world-whole conscience countenance a lie, Countermand mandates if but primitive, Yet preacknowledged to allegiance sworn ? Desertion ? Nay ! the duty first self-imposed In voluntary self-abandonment, Were prime of obligations as of rights ! If that the shackles thwart the truth at growth (If I be wiselier I than formerly And irk d by dead-hand of the self that was), Yet law is Soul for souls self-bound thereby (And I continuously self the same, Accountable to every earlier oath !). And orders and authorities have place For him, yon admiral, for these my crew (He over me as I am over them) Incapable, either, of self-governance else ! Nor mine the self-governance save soul include, Contemplate, so subordinate, their zeal For the wrong way of the world ; and work through them Not self-disgraced, but by a sage respect For pledge and patience of the personal vow 160 THE BLOCKADER In the sight of all ; by consequence of soul True to the old, worn ways made obsolete But wonderfully luring on, in law Of absolution by the self-command Man out of molecule but by molecule still At self-evolvement ! Sail ? A sail ? Escaped The slipperier while I d speculate : blind, blind Through conscience utmost clarity ? "Give chase! Solid shot ! " Ho ! She shall not break blockade ! 161 THE PATROL HUGE, phosphor-gleaming surges gainst the dim, Wind-scurrying sands burst mountainous from out Yon tumult, from yon blackening confront, Out-tower and overpeer ; to crash in ruin With roar above the roaring of the gale Froth d on the spume-slant: an insatiate, vast, Unsealike vagueness and a chaos made Of unbeginning, unreturning waste Where once was water. And o erhead the clouds Low, swift as swept smoke, dun and dusk rack on Coast-long : a merging of beach both and surge To nought. And, dank beneath the dunes, bleak lands, Bog-like and naked of all trees, shake, shiver In flat-blown sheet of sedge-blades, lowering, hoar As each gust greater than the last lays low Their crush d and cowering stem-cells. And, save sedge So shrouded this land s nakedness, were earth Engulf d, long since blown wide, else swallow d by These surf-gulps. And this desolation seems A terrible and tragic reckoning, 162 THE PATROL Quintessence and a focuss d figurehood Of world s stark orphanage : how only cloud Insensible and gale unmeaning, by Effort to wipe out land or sea alike To indiscernibility, are given For reconciling s stead ; and mockingly (For union of a living sea and land) In irony bewilder this wild beach With sifting aye and sifting, bolting o er Unalterably all these myriad sands Sans place or order. I alone of the night Seem life, seem order-borne : yet mockingly Lost in mine effort to be guardian Of sea or land ; seem utterly like gale Or surge or cloud-rack or these withering blades, An irony and chaos. I, like light Before the world-creation, am nor man Nor earth nor waters which be over earth Nor beneath earth : the demarcation stopp d And world run backward till before the light Came or the waters were beneath, above, Here, yon nor anywhere. And I, alone, 163 EARLIER POEMS Unaided fall to chaos and am spent By soul s exhaustion. Here on the sands I sink But to be buried, sifted ten times o er With scurrying silt-storms ; and am miserably Perishing for this orphanage, this world Orderless, godless, uncreated, nought ; The iteration and reiterance Ended no way, no cyclic forth-and-turn Of sane patrol ; but one insanity Of unreturning, wherefore unadvanced, Stiff stationship : patrol s obliteration. What were this order, God, creation ? Whence Its nothingness proved of the night and rack ? Here in the chill exhaustion someway life Shows novel as the pulse-beats weaken, leaps A fresh interpretation ! All is lost : World ended. Build I in the death anew A world ; create, order and aye uphold A true patrolship ; am first realizing An absolute guardship which itself shall prove Sea, strand or land, cloud or the gale, one truth Of genuine inexhaustion ; self-support 164 THE PATROL Unending, infinite-cycled ; even by being Returnless, unbeginning ! Lo ! I lie Drooping to death ; soaring to light alive ! This orphanage, this chaos and this stop Supposed, by no beginning and no God ! T is proven. And this gale is all that was From first ; no first else ; nay, no first defined. This is the worldhood : chaos, nothingness In all times terminant, an unremittent, Inexorable, absolute blockade To any journeying ; the mere machine Proved mere machine, hence utterly run-down. E en though the day to-come may constantly Succeed night ; sunshine and the fecund spread Of earth confronting ocean s moisture-breath For marriage-procreation be the bourne Of every storm-rack ; though creation come To severate the waters constantly ; Yet is the demarcation now wiped out. This moment no polarity of earth To ocean and no unioning of light EARLIER POEMS Are mine. But instantly is God deposed Creation, order, law defunctionate To orphanage. And I, incapable Of guardianship, am no man ; never was Nor could be creature of an order d scheme, Patrol of this lost boundary ; but am not ; Even as this emptiness I deem d an use Of ocean-sperm and land-fertility Swoons storm-obliterate. The chaos swarms ; The rack sweeps on and over nothingness ! Though is the vast suggestion mystic-borne In on the swooning spirit; how, in last Extremity, most isolate unuse And worth lessness of creature that I was (Sunk then in sand-storms, shrivelling away To spume-shrunk indiscernibility World-like), how yet this deadweight which I am Sums up and comprehends as ne er before This tragedy, this elemental loss Now first perceived, now known a tragedy ; Whence personally vital, valuable And genuine as can be no creation, 166 THE PATROL No order d iterance : self-processive ; ay, Appreciates, realizes in this doom Of earth, air, ocean and the nought of things Someway a worldhood, a sufficiency Of self-assumption were it earth s, air s, ocean s ? An ordering, creation, nay, an end ? Or, in default of each and all of these (These unit-portions of the spent machine Proved zero ; every unit yielding place To a total, infmitesimally whole, Self-individual uniqueness), rather A somewhat in whose desolation felt Of self (self-conscienced emptiness) is found No use, indeed, nor order, no patrol Of forth-and-turn and turn-again ; but value Of estimation, poise and focusship Ensphering, self-use beauty which can need No purpose and no sanction, yet nor God Beyond the autovital, through and through Uniquely self -establish d ; each in pause Eternal but by being incessantly, Interminably fluxion d ? Can the strength 167 EARLIER POEMS Of this corporeal tragedy rear up My bodily presence over and beyond This battling, baffling of the terrible gale To re-exertion in self-exercise Of adequate inexhaustion, making way Where no way was : ah ! guardian utterly Of overwhelming tempest ? Through this storm I stretch abroad, brooding as light before Creation. And am chaos, rack ; am world ! This, then, is godship ; this, the cause, supposed Abandon d ; this, the guardianship, patrol Of earth and ocean on this swept sand-beach To swoon ! Thus in the estimated loss, The conscious sacrifice extinguishing The bodily progress and the finite zeal, Springs space-transcendence ! In the storm first find Ocean and earth the ocean-difference From earth by self-abandonment of all Distinctive feature ! And the paradox Makes of my burial, my perishing, A perseverance. Can this strange truth be ? 168 THE PATROL Someway these limbs bestir. A tingling steals Through flesh and marrow; that the beat of brain Pulses the blood at heart ; that now I lift Body erect and stand upon these feet For forward progress : thus ; and thus. I move ; Resume patrolship. And yon eastward rift Augurs a storm-subsidence and the dawn ! Lo ! was the truth but paradox ; my dream A quietism : how that the world might run Back from accomplishment; assuredly That pause could be of any purposive Use and advancement, maintenance or end ? Have I been drunk with derogation from Ripe humanhood, become as untaught babe In birth-approximation of this numb Death-swooning? And am now by blood s revolt Revitalized, re-masking at this dawn s Storm-respite to soul-husks not quite slough d-off Of orderly patrol, the turn-again Aye and return through number d, finite shifts Of the demarcation of a land from sea, 169 EARLIER POEMS Maintenance of a severance, a beach Created ; to God s worn creatorship, Establishment as of mechanic world And man, each insufficient to maintain Self or the other, save if by recourse To authority and preestablish d scheme Inexplicable, being ex macUna ? Can soul forswear soul s death-experience ; Born again (nay, now first well-born !) be still Unautogenerate, unsophisticate Creature of order and a selfless God Supposed : but in that agony supreme Outlived, drown d down not rehabilitate ? Sooth, twas a supreme sanity, insane (Here I take up obliterated lines With firmness fresh of foot and strength of limb) By stress of concentration : world and God Focuss d so microcosmic as to seem Nought but my bodily swooning ; now recharged With wide vitality ; none less ensphered By mine expansive, unimprison d soul God and the world a godship and a world 170 THE PATROL Made over new (these footmarks on the sand Are a new path cut out, untrod before And unretractable mine, yet these sands Which hitherto were sands , not mine ; which in That swooning were made mine, not then these sands !) And I a cosmic soul, a spirit of earth, Air, ocean and this ocean-beach : as these Are soul too ; each, some focus of me here In comprehension : world-in-me, the God ! Lo ! dawn ; whose orderly returning streams No iteration of created light Spawn d upon chaos ; but whose after-storm Is a re-birth of this my tempest and This self-same tempest of earth, sky and sea ; Divine and needing no establishment ; Unique ; unknown before ; criterion Of all-time ; by world s very orphanage A self-sustainment, ordering afresh The demarcations ; morning s after-night ! Lo! how the tempest calms itself; sea, sky 171 EARLIER POEMS And land acquire, now first, distinctivewise Their intercourse, their organism. My spirit Guardeth a worldhood ; ceaseless, unbegun And unreturning proveth aye patrol ! 172 A DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY RESERVING my best answer till the end : Friend, I am glad of opportunity (Returning thanks for gratulation given) Now on attainment of my good degree To offer explanation womanwise Of woman s aim ; how, modern yet madonna, We nowise for the man s-acquirement Doff femininity ; but far the more Attain the real, ideal womanhood. For justification seems essential here (If not in your eyes, yet required of mine) Of me who undertake, more ways than one, To be the equal helpmate of a man. And, in so setting forth apology For manlier womanhood, I gladly greet Manhood that learns to read doubly aright, Can comprehend the womanly in man. This, in appreciation of that work Of ethic grace, more woman s gift than man s, 173 EARLIER POEMS Which my philosophy so well approves, My womanhood shall aid you carry on. Modern : madonna ? Can the sweet, old faith In innocence, in household holiness Abide sophistication of our times? Woman, the wise, be woman any more? Can girlhood grace, the glad simplicity Of young, ingenuous heavenliness survive Strict application of equality With standards of a strenuous competition, World s sweat-and-blood contention man with man? Ay ; and in thus surviving best transfuse The mundane manhood, make world s wealth and health Heavenly-feminine, an whole humane! First, for the trivial accessories Of garb and guise of speech, I would not urge Man-modes or manners. By some hours of contact With maids too mannish in their cloth and cut Of talk, I reach conclusion that such scouts Sent in reconnaissance advanced of the guard Are simply spies to bring back tales of the camp 174 A DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Its orientation, outlook, walls, redoubts Merely, not privy to the commander s mind Of either side, not serviced of the staff Fit to interpret information filch d. These are the sexless who scarce maid, scarce Lose lovability of femininehood Nor gain the compensation of man-insight Into proportions, dignities of things. Them I pass over ; though admit the garb Man-modish of presumptive usefulness When, yielding to demands of deftness, maids May yet not cast aside maid-modesty By too conspicuous precociousness In time, when men s own minds learn to combine Propriety with the freedom, not as now Through long association needs suspect A laxness with the unconvention d style. And also I d admit the maid, if frank, Were then more sure of speech to countervail Men s coarseness, want of courtesy ; to teach In practising a sober chivalry Of man s-to-woman, woman s-speech-to-man 175 EARLIER POEMS Direct, distinct, yet sympathetic ; mellow d Not by superfluous gallantry, but open Admission of a mutual reverence. These things will with the culture of the times Ripen, the outward rind of seed within. Tis the intention, quality attain d Of spiritual richness, which makes well or ill The maidliness or manliness of mode ; Interpretation yet dependent on Environment, mind-habit man s or maid s. Which leads me to the kernel of my creed ; Necessity that aught of great or good, If to be instant good, not obsolete Nor overwhelm d, must howsoever deep, And all the more in virtue best of depth Must lift at level, ne er below the brim, Of the flood of life ; how world-environment Such as the times have labor d and brought forth Affords criterion ; and but well or ill (Though well-and-ill give meaning to the mean, Value-directive to above-below ; 176 A DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY And in such sense were moral-absolute ! ) Is found above, below respectively The best mean of attainment of the times In the purpose and the practice pitch d upon By way of instance : marriage, humanhood. That which were well in man, we d both agree, When battle-ax meant wooing the bloodshed s Barbarity were barbarous but now In the taste of now ; were best at that brute date. The maid who sulk d at spindle in her tower Daylong, and nightlong waiPd her plight, were nought To the purpose of perfection in our time Unless for a social gain by pity given, A satisfaction that she wax not worse In the nerves and need asylum for her pains ! And if in home-communion womanhood Be not, all ways, full equal of the man (Whate er may prove a measure of attainment) Is woman of necessity degraded In the ultimate humanhood, the family. Ay, and can family in wife degraded Motherhood proved inadequate to man 177 EARLIER POEMS Prosper in fatherhood left lone and mateless ; Man find humanity, be human-whole In union proved no partnership humane? Thus it behoves to match the best in man With woman-measure equal, measure meet For the masculine attainment through the world (Focuss d and centred at the hearth of home ; Without which, sex needs here no argument ! ) In best and brightest. If that best be love (Without which, home-community were nought- As you nor I should anywise dispute ! ) Behoves a close inquiry whether love Nought differing, as love, in either sex ; Being union, if of infinite-diverse For either, each-in-each identically Prosper by much sophistication, candor Of intellectual determinism : Whether a logick d love be Poetry! And, if the intellectually complex Be proved to prosper love in modern man, Must woman, to attain full womanhood, Acquire the characteristic modern mind. 178 A DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Friend, my philosophy has taught me much (But you too know how love s entail d of learn ing!) Beneath the times appearance. At the first I nursed a skepticism juvenile Anent cool wooings with much circumstance Of pros and cons and welfare of the race. Till, by some sight of wisdomless, rude worship CalPd love love once, when world stood at les strength Of stress yet little beyond appetite In carelessness for consequence to her Beloved for inability to comfort, Protect ; in lust-romantic selfishness Scarce Love it came upon me that the more Of knowledge more the spiritual intent, World-conscious content actual of the union In the spirit-self call d Love. If world be one (One time-stream conscious of before-and-after, With content ever-cumulant both ways), Then is that oneness by diversity Obtain d, ne er by disparity twixt minds 179 EARLIER POEMS Sex-married but rather, by a wealth in each At acme of its own development Contributive to the spirit-partnership More and more, more and more an unioning In ripe reality concrete and true, Most whole by most complexity. And man Scientist, if but high philosopher At heart (philosophy, the world-made-self Of science), living lover cosmical ! Man loves not less by learning more and more ; But more distinctly, more directly loves ; Unioning in his love a world more rich, More heaven-holy as more habitable With every admonition of the brain. The old simplicity was worldhood once When yet concrete, complex d as world then knew ; Not now. The innocent inadequacy Precludes proportionate love-with-wisdom, leaves Not godliness, not whole humanity. Nought is in knowledge of the wide god- world To cancel wonder, worship : more and more Beauty made manifest the more love-known ; 1 80 A DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Man, woman, known in mutual reverence. Whence, would I share the burden of the world, The glory and splendor and beauty , firm in love, Be fit for fostering of men to-come And women of the future family, Must we in family be, both alike, (And wisdom means a culture of the highest, A love-enraptured world-philosophy !) Wisely in love and else no love in fact : I, only so, eternal womanhood. Friend, by this intricate tediousness I take A serious luxury in writing long, Painstakingly in pure, supreme delight ; Nor need excuse me to the poet-lover Feeling (scarce song in a love less adequate !) Alone true poetry in logick d love. Not that you want the argument ! Your prayer Assumed the worth of the woman nobly sued, After these years forbearance whilst I toil d, With gratulation of her task s success ! But for the justification of myself, 181 EARLIER POEMS My woman s way unto my mind of a man ; My woman s way which yieldingly says : * Yes *. How should a woman in these latter days Madonna but by a maid-modernity Want for the word to make of woman s world Man s heaven, ope humanity to both ? Thus, for this multitude of reasons (woman Is woman more for reasoning rigidly, Woman indeed worth man but by man-logic), I repeat, Yes . With reverence I deem Myself shown worthy of an equal bond With man, a mutual-freedom. I declare Purpose to put to the proof my good degree As wife and woman-fosterer of childhood Worthy to serve, worthy to share and show World-self-control. For that I know your love (Knowledge comports with love, by all these proofs !), I love you and will live with you, we twain In world-sophistication made one soul. Thus I accept the gratulation given At the gratulation s test; admit attainment 182 A DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Formal of fitness for the modern life Of loving logic, lovable counselhood, Here in this letter little is of new, But all sincere. In all sincerity 183 A HORTICULTURIST GOOD growing-weather ? Sir, I seldom find Souls of a leisure that delights to lay Ear to the growth of the ground and listen life s Slow, verdurous vegetating. Yet my life Is lapp d in leisure of a listening soul (Leisure by verdurehood made busiest so) ; One kind affinity for flowery facts Their loves and likes and splendid prospering In the sun here and the watering of the rain. And, for the gradus of the yearly growth Is generous and one annual orbit scarce Distinct at large from annual orbits gone Year by year, season after season, finds My sympathy much space to enter in, Enjoy and ponder-through the lives of these In various, vegetative meanings ; mind Of mine a source as of philosophy Interpreting cell-science of our times To a function d monadism. And, for the years Are years, is long-establish d sympathy 184 A HORTICULTURIST Sweet; and mine insight rooted, great and green. That thus I seldom crave the human sort Of sympathy ; and, while accepting yours For a genuine godsend of discipleship Such as you care to offer, I should maintain Communion nathless satisfying, sir, Here in the garden though you chose to go. Yet go not ! For the human comradeship Exceeds the vegetative. And t is solace This once to parley in equality. Of my speech, most must be to show you here Humanity in plantship ; poetry Of planthood that is in me. Though but the more Is speech distinctive over and beyond The plantship of our manhood. And in your air I scent at any rate a verdurehood Of young and vigorous insight ; and would speak Where comprehension can accompany ; Not, as too often, a derision, coarse Or keen miscomprehension of my mood. Ay, there have been a many travelers here, From fame of my fine flowers ; hardly one EARLIER POEMS Whose motive to admire them was mine. There have been many minds to question mine Concerning management, assistance given To planthood-needs and hopes ; and many eyes To feast on scarlet, azure, golden-pink, Purple and passion of the great leaves green; Yet hardly an heart intelligent to love. As for the crude, ill-educated sort Who gape at the flame of the foot-wide petalling Call d poppy, stare the larkspur s azure blind ; Fall-to with brush and pallet, paint my garden For an arabesque mosaic ; go away Cocksure that color is the crux of things Nor do I care, that they d admit space-form If form be just their color s diagram ! I take small comfort from such artist-crumbs Of human character. I quarrel not With the canvas d color-clots they carry off To frame and feast on ; sooth, their color-plan Is good as mine in the garden or, if better, Is better to their credit! T is but their claim Of ultimate intelligence, perception 1 86 A HORTICULTURIST Of pure sensational impression, cause Of all that s real in thought , that boils my blood ! If they could see how close to savagery Their psychologic fallacy betrays them ! Could they but feel how the creed s consistency Would carry them beneath intelligence At all, down, down below the weeds of grass, Clean beneath loam and rocks and dust ; how * sense If sense alone, mere color-scheme , were quite Incapable of any schematism : 4 Felt color , color but by a value yielded In each concatenating soul of us (In their souls only less than in mine own!); Sense therefore real but in sense self-transcension (If elementally as a manifold Of photic combination, then the more By meaning the flower-in-us, the leaf-in-us : And this, regardless of a three or two Dimensions in such language-of-the-eye !) If they could grasp this fair philosophizing Sure, they would pause in the painting, grow more worthy 187 EARLIER POEMS The wonder-beauty of the world they flout The world they not intentionally, indeed, Though none the less inexorably, flout ; Deducing consciousness from * spots and points Spotless as pointless save interpreted Language-like to a purport, at the last, Of photic-couch d enthusiasms of soul : The soul inane unless by sympathy Of insight universal, thus express d ! Pity, that most of those who visit here Dabbling in color, may not rest content With insight yielded to the spots they paint ; But still must half-explain it all away, The planthood with our manhood s sympathy For the planthood in us. Oh, they still assert Their objectivity (quite impossible Sans object-insight!), still forswear their creed By what their brush creates ; yet scarce explain How a comprehension comes themselves but spots, Blotches of hue can color comprehend? So much for those half-cultured who d deny The intellect that makes intelligent 188 A HORTICULTURIST Even its degradation, their degree Of stultification let them paint and pry ! They paint fair pictures ; guess nor why nor how. Then there come others of the science-brood : Psychologists not these, but physiologues Who miss the meaning much as painters do ; If yet, as by inversion, taking heed Too much to the plant, too little to themselves, Fail in the reconstruction equally, Lacking analogies intuitive Despite a parade and pomp and circumstance Of an observation absolute supposed ! Yea, they are wearisome who lay such claim To the final verdict, last exactitude By chemical analysis of cells ! Ay, analyse back to a primal element One, mark you, not such four-score of their scheme The hypothetical sub-hydrogen In quantitative self-complexities, Or any ion, unit what s-its-name, For quintessential basis of their cells Explain you anything ; or, haply, state 189 EARLIER POEMS Now first with nicety, exactitude The problem life-philosophy s to solve ? What of their tissuey nuclei ? I grant Great value in the evolutionary, The functional comparisons of plant And human organism though each express d In algebraic signs, atomic symbols The simplest (so the most inadequate) Of common terms for a proper place and purpose In tracing continuities throughout And bases for the felt analogies Of insight-sympathy so sub-defined ; Not for their purpose of reducing plant And man alike to a cell-nonentity ! Prate of root-pressure, ferment, chlorophyll, Capillary-absorption, permeation Wholly accounted-for by mechanism, Contiguance osmotic cell with cell ! Sir, what would all their cell-stuffs in the world Be cells of, cells in fact, save cells-of-plants ; The plant explaining still the cell, as cell Some least explains the molecule, as man 190 A HORTICULTURIST Explains by modified analogy (A modification based in knowledge of The springs of action, function motivate) In insight-sympathy the living plant. For otherwise were every cell the same Whate er the chemic complex (chemistry Itself indifferent, failing reference To the over-planthood, over-humanhood Criterial of the contrasts) , plant with rock Clean interchangeable, and man at best Mechanical recorder, comprehending Nor rock nor plant, nor the nature of himself Which, even by being the man-of-molecules, Conceives and so demarks both plant and man In terms both cellular-molecular And vegetative-human none the less. Cell-structure s nowise structural enough (Though ne er so chemic in the last resort!) To render comprehensibly as tissue The least elaborated thallogen ! The chemic fallacy refutes itself In terms of protoplasm preassumed 191 EARLIER POEMS An elementary material Equipp d with each and all plant s faculties Supposed explain d by reference thereto! Thus for the physiologues ; they d miss the mark Of planthood by discovering too much ; Rending and tearing till the plant lie dead : Then edifying life with life s remains! And, for the better botanists who class And reclass by the manner of each frame s Resemblance, theirs is mainly but to aid (Save also, that they too teach relationships Of stock to stock in outworn ancestries) Memory s nomenclature, add to each Familiar face an unforgotten name A worthy way ; but still beside the mark Of best appreciation ; and yet an aid To us who add a poetry to speech, Vivify epithets, both name and know ! Remains the poet-knower, I or you (With chemic erudition well-equipp d Toward managing, directing planthood-hopes 192 A HORTICULTURIST Whose health-achievement, novelty-success Sheer color advertises to the eye!), Friend and befriended of the patient plants ; A comprehension and intelligence Beyond the plants , yet yielding planthood voice Of humanhood. Not as from human tongue, The plant calPd human and endow d with speech ; No such crude, antiquated Grecianism, Conventional inheritance of verse ; But selfhood of the planthood felt in me, Made vocal in the man, appreciator ! Friend, I have spoken of myself to you, Of the planthood in me ; making poetry Of the mutualism. Friend, I pray you, throw To ash-heap for the food (not flower and fruit) Of life in you these sensuous-simple points Of the colorist, these cells save for their union In the living whole ! Sing heart-philosophy Of each through each, so sing my larkspurs loud In the azureness and sap-fertility Of rhythm, sonorous syllabling of self ! Science and sentience, bad psychology 193 EARLIER POEMS Are the poverty of intellect of those Who pose for preachers of the modernism (Of a color-gloating, of a clinic-garden In gardenless disintegrance) and fain Make idols of fact. Friend, why not truth : like mine ? 194 THE PRIMA DONNA AH, but I laugh that weary, happy laugh Our Browning wrote of ; like his Herakles After the labor and accomplishment Husband mine, after this my conquering You quote me now, their outburst of applause ! The great tones sung, in technic perfected ; Authoritative ; satisfaction full ! Thus, I have gain d mine art s acknowledgment ; Can beg a respite, steal an hour for learning To understand this art they rave about ; Comprehend labor and victory conquest new ? Friend, for what end the labor all these years ? Is it that in me something wakes beyond, Far beyond, in and through the conquest here; Some dim suspicion of a failure lurk d In all this worship loud and eminence ? Failure, save understanding yield me aid, End comprehended prove end earn d and won ? Ay, for t is mainly they applaud the voice ; The song but little, technic rated far 195 EARLIER POEMS Above mere music meant in every note : The strength superb and sinew d mastery Of the thews, their admiration ; not the aim Lion or hydra, death s self, overcome, Appropriated, reconciled with life ? Husband ! What if, before the morning wanes To noon ; ere I rouse to the daily stint Of sheer vocality (you, to music s work Genius d, creative) ah ! what if we two Couch d happily over against this breakfast-hearth Philosophize nay, what if I hold-forth From throne of pettiness preeminent, Instruct the man of genius how my art Half-scorn d, sir (nay, in heart !) by either of us ! - How this my failure in my victory Proves victory over failure by intent, Means music ; ay, despite such shameless wrong Done music in my master d craftsmanship, My plaudits that declass the genuine crown Won, worn in spirit, husband, by your soul (You listening patiently) nor fear lest I Catch hoarsening by the talk ! I could not sing 196 THE PRIMA DONNA To-night, so stirr d my heart is by this false Tribute to technic of the dabblers there ; Ne er could I sing save some relief of talk Intervene, free my soul from scorn of self For failing (in interpreter s-attempt) To obliterate the interpreter, efface Technic in triumph of interpreting s Transparency ; for triumphing as now Diva and brava, what you will ! Ah, husband ! Fancy his Herakles exhibiting Muscles and sinews to the sleeking palm Of pleased Admetos, purged Augean folk ! T were Herakles to question : Next, what task ? Yes, and what task, what end ? You know the end Best in your brain ; somewhat, perchance, in the song Conceived, composed of the manuscript. But see you (Your work has craft, but of a nobler kind !) Song s meaning best in the masteries I mouth By any virtue of their mastery ? Nay ; in your heart, though half-articulate, 197 EARLIER POEMS I dare discern a want : * This voice whose speech Woman s, divine (being my wife s) must mean (As I mean her soul by each song conceived) My soul, must still intend to interpret me The husband, understood, made one by love. Yet there the half-articulation fades ! Friend, is it wife s-love merely that should seize And speak the soul ; subordinate the method By worship in the music, every note ? Or is it somewhat in you (ah ! in me !) Deeper and holier that demands of me ? Well, then, for the mode your husband-love assumes (Your genius self-disguise) which would support These people in their tribute of applause : True to the timbre ! But timbre s criterion, Is it some sensuous analysis Of how tone in the abstract, tone as tone, Mere tone must be, to be tone-beautiful ? Is it, conviction springs in the concave vault Of palate, passages to a nicety Adjusted that the vibrant resonance Assume just such a sort of resonance 198 THE PRIMA DONNA As, entering in, tickles appropriately To the ears formation, fibre-sac and cell ? So ; but are nerve and sac and fibre judge Of sound s heart-fitness ; is the vibrant vault Warrant of an art-value ? Dubiously ; Being themselves, in their organic gust, Not only life-subordinate but, even A register of bygone ways ancestral In taste one-time aesthetic but not now Exemplary of our soul-onwardness An onwardness which form d or sac or cell ; And ever modifies despite the drag And deadweight of their frame conservative, Whose function chiefly were to keep us sane And tame unto our sociality ! Whence, if the tone be bound to please the ear Merely, must all life-satisfying lift Of soul-conatus be denied to it, And only that be art which ancestors In some now-negligible infant-age Of the earth conceived and earnestly put forth, Maybe, but which to our maturity 199 EARLIER POEMS Must prove but babbling. And the physic-tone (Mere air-vibration, mark !) however order d (Be it ancestrally by structure-chance Or by deliberate choice of men to-day) To abstract, mathematic unities Of ratios overtonic, what you will Of arithmetical simplicities, Can claim authority only if the soul (A pretext which appeals to you nor me) Should dwell in an indolence for sweetness sake And fain eschew a strenuous nobleness ! T is well, to know whereby the bland be bland Of structure ; though to choose, for strength of choice ! Remains what ? Just this genius of you there Filter d and fritter d someway through my voice To ears and brains and souls agape of them : No emptiest, aural yearning, no, nor sample Authentic of the laboratory-tone, But tone-expression self alive for song ! Fancy his Herakles cutting out some thew, Slashing and slicing sinews, muscles so 200 THE PRIMA DONNA That each might be admired more overtwise, Each obtain due share of the mob s remark, Ere it undertake a fresh strain presently ! Where, then, were muscle, sinew for the work ? Nay, he knew well each muscle s ministry In the man ; as I, each tone s unto the song ! Tis the appropriateness of sound to meaning (Muscle with sinew interwove to bear Pressure precise to the point the man s whole self Wills) based best in departure from the gust Of merely ear as ear, if masterfully Whole t is the mastery s self-subordinance That yields voice to your music ; nowise mine ! Ah ! but my soul s original research, Basis and background of interpreting ? Insofar as bent, grasp and insight all, To comprehension of your wonder-mood, Perfect interpreter I well may seem ! But, grant, the rank sinew, overweening, thwart The will of the hero ; insofar as thus Self -thwarted, then no hero and no task ! Technic, essential to effacing it ! 201 EARLIER POEMS But my tirade yet bears an inference E en beyond aught of Browning s Herakles ! (E en beyond, friend, your inmost fear for me !) I m but a stop-gap ; Herakles, heroic Not solely for a mastery-muscular Of world, of death ; ah, more for the presaging, A prophecy in him, of heroes new, Of mastery more complex, conquering To some task s end more worldly-intimate ; Some self-expression in and through more means Than muscles merely ; some philosopher, Elucidator, artist like to you ! Where were the value to our modern world (Nay, even to a post-heroic classic-age Poetic as we are also musical !) Of a latter Herakles ; save Herakles Embrace modernity ? No muscle now Finds ultimate tasks, regenerative aims Work d through thews, sinews merely ! For this once Let me show prophecy, show forth my spirit In depths beyond mere prima-donnaship (Even though deeply soul s interpreter): 202 THE PRIMA DONNA More worthy to be mated through your own ! Where find you music most ? In the vibrant voice Ne er so entrancing (nay, ne er so intent With sense-subordinance !); in voice of mine At height of soul-interpreting ? Or then When in the silent, sense-immediate Brain the vast beauty bursts of issuant song Unvoiced, yet self-articulant indeed ; Made manuscript, maybe ; yielded to me To lift and thrill and all-transfuse me through With wonder and worship of imagined sound, Perfectly plastic, truth-determined then ? Miscomprehend me not ! Stand I and sing, Add I to the music-marvel hints of charm, I allow not music s, not the mind s that sang In vision, but visibly women s ; at the best Extraneous, adventitious ; at the worst (Look to worse women !) art-detestable ! Ah ! were the sweat and reeking of the god Good, best, themselves, or only by default Of some great engine to envelop death, Crush and o erpower man-directed still, 203 EARLIER POEMS Conceived, invented, executed; man s Multiple-marvel of effectiveness For just the purpose, end and aim of the task ? An * instrumentation , you d aver ? Not quite ; Save as a second stop-gap ; halfway stage Through mere mechanic enginery toward strength Of the logical positing, a forensic lore Surpassing in the self-projection ; speech Of poesy (ay, and of music) genius-made : Fit to transcend even death, made death-through-life ! Instrumentation ? Insofar a step From the extraneous, personal appeal Of mere interpreter soul-ill-at-ease, (Never, not once purely interpreting The maker s meaning) riddance, in some least Degree, of mediator yet in kind Originator and confuser so ! His Herakles were poet possibly ! Stands poesy now, intoned in pulpit, droned At tableside, spouted above the pit Poesy, as in the ante-music age Of troubadour, of rhapsode chanting it 204 THE PRIMA DONNA Poesy ? Or poesy most, silently sent From brain through brain by symbol d syllabling ? 1 The silent symbol still a mediator ? No; no ! The syllabling in the poet s soul Speaks not save soul-included, comprehended (In such sort as your reader may attain) Except for sight s absorption of the types Sans mediation s externality : The meaning-in-the-sound the poet-pure Taken up, reproduced, identified In my mind-substantive, meaning-in-sound Of mine ; suggested, straight interpreted Even by the interpreter s obliterance The symbols nowise spoken, no, nor heard ! 1 Understood but by previous mediance Call d education ? Mediate previously, Not now as contemporary with the song ; But inborn, made immediate instantly ! I leave the elucidation to some seer More versed in dialectic lore than me, More capable of tracing point by point Thought s infinite labyrinths I dogmatize ; 205 EARLIER POEMS State you the truth with just enough of truth s Elaboration self-explanatory To satisfy my soul if scarce convince you ; I appeal in faith just to the faith in you, Leave law to lawyers pleading. T is your song Unsung, made manuscript, so silently Symbolized to self-syllabling that springs Direct, transcendent, satisfying, whole In the soul of me, made one with yours by love ; Love, through love s most elaborate symphonies Identifiable in song ! I sing To-night again ? Nay, cancel the contract, seek Respite for nerves so set at odds with fact ? Ha ? Have I frighten d you ; the pulse, the eye Flush d, fever d in me ? I admit some glow Of indignation godlike against ways So pitiful, so unlike music s ! Mistress Of song, indeed ! Ah ! but the end in view (Realized through the soul s revolt from such applause! ), Mine aim that dignifies the technic, lends More than interpreter s-efficiency 206 THE PRIMA DONNA To mediation ; and presages thus The mightier music of the printed page, The limitless fresh opportunity For multiple-symphony once the subtleties Step by step but familiarized through ear, Made comprehensible ! that now I sing My simpler-sensuous melodies ; make mine art Didactic for a purpose ; teach and try To make intelligible the music-mode Bit by bit to the loves and lives of them, These people with their music-moved applause, Who know not what they do ! Husband of mine, Herakles prophesied Euripides ; Presaged our very Browning s genius-piece ! 207 J UUJ.1IO , *\ Earlier poems R635 S\ LIBRARY